Cockroach Contests Come Easier

Californians who get their news from TV are far more likely to learn about Jim and Tammy Bakker, the National Cockroach Contest or dog-and-owner look-alike pageants than they are the impact and implications of more than 1,600 bills that the state Legislature passes into law each year.

That’s the conclusion of a USC professor who is completing a book-length study of how the news media cover state and local government in California.

“Those who are substantially dependent on local television or radio for daily information live in virtual ignorance about state political affairs,” Tracy Westen of USC’s Annenberg School of Communications writes in a chapter titled “A Portrait of Neglect.”

In a survey conducted over eight days during the closing weeks of the 1987 legislative session a year ago, Westen found that the highest-rated newscasts in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Fresno and Sacramento devoted an average of about one minute per hour to state legislative issues.

“It’s a lot easier to cover a bikini contest than it is to cover, say, air pollution legislation,” said Westen, whose study, “The California Channel,” is scheduled for publication this spring.

The study proposes creation of a new, C-SPAN type of cable channel that would offer live coverage of floor debates, committee sessions and votes on major issues in the state Capitol as well as regular news and analysis programming patterned after “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.”

Eventually, said Westen, such a cable operation would also include selected city council sessions and state Supreme Court proceedings in its live coverage.

In his study of the closing days of the 1987 session, Westen found that KNBC Channel 4 in Los Angeles gave more air time on an 11 p.m. newscast to the National Cockroach Contest and to Jim and Tammy Bakker Halloween masks than it did to AIDS legislation passed that day in Sacramento.

A 5 p.m. newscast on KGO-TV in San Francisco devoted more coverage to the theft of a mammoth Bullwinkle balloon and a dog-and-owner look-alike contest than it did to the passage of bills on auto insurance reform, anti-pollution devices and AIDS education, Westen said.

In all, news programs monitored in the survey devoted the bulk of their coverage to local news and feature stories. Only 1.7% of their time was devoted to state legislative news, compared to 2% for international news, 7.2% for weather and 12.3% for sports.

During the same period, the study said, radio stations devoted 1.9% of their news coverage and newspapers devoted 2.5% of their space to legislative issues.

One factor in television’s neglect of Sacramento coverage is that “it’s expensive,” Westen said. “With the money that news directors save on their state bureaus, they can put other kinds of programming on the air that will get them higher ratings.

“All you have to do for a bikini contest is aim the camera. You have to know something about air pollution before you can report that story. It’s easier and cheaper to do the bikini contest.”

But it isn’t just the cost, Westen said.

“I’d say chiefly they’re just lazy,” he said. “With deregulation in this country, TV news is losing track of what it ought to be doing. They’re doing what’s easiest and gets them the fastest, easiest ratings. Station owners know that the Federal Communications Commission no longer holds them accountable for what they put on the air concerning public affairs.”

Westen said TV news directors he interviewed for his book told him legislative news is “boring, uninteresting and limited primarily to talking heads.

“But boring to whom?,” he asked. “The problem is that many stations conclude that if 20% of their audience wants to see legislative news and 25% wants to see bikini contests, they’ll go with the bikini contest. That leaves the other 20% with nothing.”