A need to vote with the remote

It’s difficult not to feel nostalgia for the days when local television was merely a wasteland.

Today, most of it is a vile swamp: soul-deadening hours of ossified sitcoms punctuated by moments of sheer horror, syndicated shows featuring psychics and the lurid convergence of exhibitionism and exploitation masquerading as talk. Then there are the programs convention demands we call news, though most station operators long ago turned their faces resolutely away from any recognizable journalism and hardened their hearts against its most rudimentary notions of responsibility.

The general situation is squalid and grows obviously worse with each passing year. Yet people continue to watch and, more important, advertisers continue to buy. So a sensible person might ask: Why bother worrying about it?

Actually, there are very good reasons, and events this week have brought them into unusually sharp focus.

One, of course, is the chilling finding by poll after poll that a majority of Americans now say that local television is their primary source of news. Another reason is the bruising debate now underway in Washington over whether to permit ever greater concentrations of media ownership. Then there is the release Wednesday of an extraordinary study by scholars at USC and the University of Wisconsin quantitatively demonstrating the appalling depths to which local TV news has declined. Finally, there is the disturbing question of whether local television news has the will or ability to play a responsible role in the historic gubernatorial recall now convulsing California politics.

Wednesday, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives surprised many media analysts when it voted, 400 to 21, to block the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to allow the networks to buy more local television stations.

Regulations currently preclude the networks, which nowadays are simply divisions of larger holding companies, from acquiring any combination of local broadcasters that gives them access to more than 35% of the nation’s televisions. The FCC wants to lift the cap -- which Viacom, CBS’ owner, and News Corp., operator of Fox, already have been allowed to exceed -- to 45%. The U.S. Senate is likely to follow the House’s lead and support current restrictions, setting up a confrontation with the Bush administration, which strongly supports lifting the cap on free-market grounds.

(Neither chamber appears eager to address the FCC’s other decision to relax restrictions on cross-ownership, which heretofore have prevented media companies from owning newspapers and television stations in the same market. Tribune Co., which owns both The Times and KTLA, is a strong proponent of cross-ownership.)

One of the witnesses who testified on the ownership question before the Senate Commerce Committee this week was Martin Kaplan, associate dean of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and director of its Norman Lear Center, which, along with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin NewsLab, conducted the study of how 122 local television stations in the country’s 50 largest media markets covered the 2002 midterm elections.

What they found was alarming: According to the study, “56% of the top-rated half-hour news broadcasts did not contain a single campaign story. In the 44% that did, the average election story was 89 seconds long.” Only 27% of the stories that aired focused on issues or analyzed campaign advertising, while 48% were about campaign strategy or polls on who was ahead.

What the study did not find was a clear link between concentrated ownership and the presentation of political news, though locally owned stations paid slightly more attention to local politics, and the only broadcast chain to which the study actually gave good marks for local coverage was the mid-size Hearst-Argyle group, which operates 10 stations from Boston to West Palm Beach.

Still, Kaplan supports maintaining both the current cap on the networks and restrictions on cross-ownership. “I think Congress is wise to keep the 35% cap,” he said, “and I think they should fight lifting the cross-ownership ban, though they probably won’t do it for political reasons. Cross-ownership diminishes the diversity of voices required for a healthy community. Today most cities are single-newspaper towns, and letting them control a television station too is unwise. The reason a newspaper buys a television station is to make money, not to acquire additional opportunities for public service.”

In fact, the study suggests, and Kaplan argues, that money is central to the deterioration of local news, though in ways far more insidious than is immediately apparent. Part of local news’ sordid situation is attributable to meager news budgets and continual cost-cutting. But, Kaplan points out, there’s “also a highly successful, highly lucrative industry of consultants who go from station to station advising managers on how to cut costs and on what makes for higher ratings. These consultants tell station managers -- whose average tenure in their jobs is about 18 months -- that political news is ratings poison. These guys live or die by their ratings, so it isn’t hard to figure out what happens next.”

But as the USC-Wisconsin study shows, the consultants are wrong, since all the Hearst-Argyle stations, which do a creditable job covering politics, “are hardly struggling for survival,” as Kaplan puts it.

Money does enter the picture in a far more insidious way. One of the study’s most disturbing findings is that, during the last midterm campaign, local television stations broadcast nearly four paid campaign advertisements for every political story they put on the air.

“The local TV business is among the most profitable businesses in the entire entertainment industry,” Kaplan explained. “One of the things that makes local stations so profitable is the huge quantity of paid political advertising on which they have an absolute lock.”

That franchise would be threatened if station owners aired even modestly comprehensive amounts of political journalism. Why should campaign managers pay to put their candidate’s views of the issues across if they’re being included in responsible electoral coverage? By holding their news budgets down, station owners push their election-year revenues up. Or, as Kaplan puts it, “Why buy a cow when you’re getting milk for free?”

Given these realities, what role can Californians expect local television news to play in the recall campaign now upon them?

Another of the Lear Center’s research projects suggests a dispiriting answer. During the 1998 gubernatorial campaign, researchers monitored stations in California’s seven largest media markets to see how much of their broadcast news time was devoted to the campaign between 6 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. What they found was that the stations studied allocated just 0.45% -- that’s right, less than one-half of 1% -- of their news broadcasts to the election of a new governor.

“If Arnold runs or if Issa’s, shall we say, colorful background becomes an issue,” Kaplan said, “it might be grist for our TV stations. But if we’re asking whether there will be coverage of the issues in any depth, I’m afraid we already know the answer.”

True. And the next question is: Should we accept it?