During any election season, responsible voters have a tough job — they have to weigh the information they receive from often-misleading campaign commercials with what they learn from often-incomplete media coverage. Of course, that’d be a lot easier if one wasn’t getting a lot more airtime than the other (.pdf).
In the month leading up to the recent 2006 mid-term elections, local television news viewers got considerably more information about campaigns from paid political advertisements than from actual news coverage, a new study shows. Local newscasts in seven Midwest markets aired nearly four and a-half minutes of paid political ads during the typical 30-minute broadcast while dedicating an average of one minute and 43 seconds to election news coverage.
The new post-election analysis also shows that most of the actual news coverage of elections on early and late-evening broadcasts was devoted to campaign strategy and polling, which outpaced reporting on policy issues by a margin of over three to one (65 percent to 17 percent). These findings come amid studies consistently showing that voters look to local television newscasts as their primary source of information about elections.
The study was conducted by the University of Wisconsin’s NewsLab, and the finding reflects the content and effect of local television news in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. I’m inclined to assume the results in the Midwest would be generally similar to those in other parts of the country.
And those results are not at all encouraging.
During an average evening newscast, viewers saw about four-and-a-half minutes of paid political ads. In that same average broadcast, viewers received less than two minutes of election news coverage, and even that tended to favor horse-race reporting instead of substantive discussion of candidates and issues. Making matters slightly worse, more than one in ten election stories mentioned, pictured, or focused on a specific campaign ad.
Moreover, as Tim Grieve noted, election news received about one-third the coverage of sports and weather, and was about equal to the time devoted to “teasers, bumpers and intros.”
For that matter, it’s getting worse. NewsLab compared this midterm cycle to the last one (2002) and found that there was less campaign coverage this year, with shorter on-air political stories.
“When you reflect on the recent campaign season, with its relentless assault of outlandish, negative political ads, you can’t help but fear what future elections may bring. This year, political campaigns invested hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to local broadcasters to get their message across during local evening newscasts,” [Larry Hansen, vice president of the Joyce Foundation] said. “All the while, local broadcasters failed in their responsibility to provide an adequate amount of substantive election coverage, which might have helped counterbalance the waves of negative ads. In the end, well funded candidates and local broadcasters win while voters, most candidates and democracy lose.”
Mike McCabe of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a political reform organization supported by the Joyce Foundation added, “Today’s report shows that paid political ads have now become the primary source of information leading into our elections. During such an important election cycle, it is alarming to see that viewers were influenced more by campaign consultants than by objective television coverage.”
Indeed, it is. I should not that it’s possible that broadcasters would be more inclined to offer more substantive political coverage during an election if they thought viewers would watch it, but either way, the trend shows a) why too much of the electorate is uninformed; and b) why candidates, parties, and political groups dump more money into TV advertising than anything else.