Program Urges Local TV News to Expand Political Coverage

As televised political coverage migrates away from broadcast television to cable news networks, a new project is setting out to convince local TV stations around the country that political coverage can also be good television.

With a $1.3-million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Norman Lear Center at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication is creating Reliable Resources, a two-year program to develop tools to help local stations, in particular, beef up their political coverage. The project hopes to persuade stations to increase the quantity of their political stories, while focusing more on issues and how they affect voters and less on the “horse race.”

The first efforts of the project will be displayed during the Aug. 14-17 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. In a space near the media work space for the thousands of journalists who will be in L.A., the project will be screening a tape of some exemplary political coverage so far from campaign 2000, as well as sponsoring panel discussions on the topic of improving broadcast political coverage.

The goal, says Lear Center director Marty Kaplan, is to show local stations that “politics is not ratings poison. We want to look at ways to improve what is still the largest public square in America, broadcast television news.”

Stations, Kaplan says, “would like to be able to do better, and what they lack are tools and resources to do it.” He said the project believes it can compile evidence to counter some of the current thinking that political stories “are not consistent with the mandate for profit.”

Indeed, rather than appeal to stations’ public-interest duties, the project hopes to show reluctant stations by example and has begun to identify political programming it thinks has been successful, without leading to a loss of ratings.

“We have to convince local stations that it is in their self-interest to do this; show them 10 No. 1 stations that have done this and haven’t been hurt by it, and here are ways the community will reward you with loyalty because you’re providing a service they need,” says Kaplan.

One problem for many small-market stations is understaffing, resulting in general-assignment reporters being thrown in to cover political stories for which they have little background knowledge, says Cinny Kennard, a former CBS News correspondent who teaches at the Annenberg School and is coordinating the project. The project has solicited tapes from about 500 stations around the country, and “we’ve found that a lot of the political stories we’ve looked at so far seemed to be done in a way that was easy and fast to get on the air,” she says.

For those stations and reporters without their own up-to-date Rolodex, Reliable Resources is setting up a source book, with names and numbers for everything from campaign contacts to academic experts on various subjects. The project’s Web site will also carry information on the key issues that emerge during the campaign, from the death penalty to gas prices.

A second, more instructional tape will be released next year. The project hopes local news directors will “show [the tape] at their morning meetings” with their reporters, Kaplan says. There will also be regional workshops for reporters as well as the establishment of a new award, the Walter Cronkite-USC Annenberg Award for Excellence in Broadcast Political Coverage.