Do Television and Politics Mix?
To be fair, stations under economic pressures to
maximize profit can make more money doing stories other than politics, even at
this time of year. Despite the hoopla of a presidential election, roughly half
of eligible Americans don’t bother to vote and presumably aren’t interested in
political stories. Because you can’t ignore a long political story in favor of
something you find more interesting—as you can in a newspaper—those bored by
politics switch channels, thus penalizing the station.
Stories the stations emphasized—the flaming crash of
an airliner in Taiwan, the cute little feature about the Lawrence Livermore
Labs doing research on something so prosaic as grilling burgers, Channel 7’s
“x-ray” camera looking through the skirts of young women—all have a powerful
human interest appeal, through life and death drama, oddity, or titillation. In
other words, they “sell” well.
Also, TV can’t zone its signal the way newspapers
can deliver different stories to different areas. So there’s an economic
penalty for covering a ballot initiative or race among candidates for public
office that’s important in San Francisco, but irrelevant in San Jose, Santa
Rosa and Walnut Creek.
Television clearly pays a greater price in profits
than newspapers for coverage that doesn’t turn the heads of as many as
possible. But the role of news isn’t to rubber neck for as big an audience as
possible. It’s to help as many as possible understand the world around them.
Just before an election the public need is
greatest for intense, independent reporting on how billions of dollars of our
money shall be spent and who shall lead our nation, our state, county, city,
even police departments and schools. Political coverage is a litmus test of the
civic responsibility of our news media. Given the extraordinary profits local
stations earn—the industry average for large market affiliate stations is about
four times that of the average U.S. firm—and the bonanza that political
advertising represents, one might expect at least a tie between journalism
ethics and the demands of Wall Street.
So what happened in the only news medium required by
law to serve the public interest (in
exchange for free use of the public’s airwaves)? We don’t know. Grade the News
received no response from any station—each of which was provided a pre-posting
copy of our analysis. It’s possible that we caught each of the stations on the
only two down nights for political reporting in the week before the vote. But
absent that, we’re left with the obvious answer that banking the extra cash
counted more than informing citizens.
-- John
McManus
