Campaign watch

Bay Area news media intensified campaign coverage, but sidelined local races

Channels 2 and 11 gave more TV time to the issues; Knight Ridder papers aided voters in our full analysis of fall 2004 political reporting

Note: An earlier version of this story contained a miscalculation of the percentage of political reporting devoted to issues in the three newspapers.

By Michael Stoll
Analysis by John McManus and Kate Davidson
Posted Nov. 17, 2004

Taking the election seriously, KTVU Channel 2 gave six candidates for Congress a total of half an hour in prime time on Oct. 23 to make their case. Chris Haugen, Republican, challenged Rep. Anna Eshoo. His priorities: terrorism, taxes and teachers.

The good news: Bay Area newspapers and television stations more than doubled their coverage of political campaigns leading up to the Nov. 2 election, compared with California's March election.

The bad: Broadcasters in particular still fell significantly short of goals proposed by high-profile groups of media reformers, who this year challenged TV newsrooms to provide at least two hours a week of prime-time, issue-centered reporting designed to help voters make informed choices.

The study found:

• Half the eight newsrooms devoted a majority of their most prominent campaign coverage to the presidential election, leaving little room for state and local races and measures.
• Only three newsrooms -- the Contra Costa Times, the San Jose Mercury News and Channel 11, devoted more than 10% of their campaign coverage to strictly local races.
• The three television stations with the most coverage overall -- Channels 2, 7 and 11, also had the lowest percentage of so-called "horse-race" or strategy coverage, instead focusing on the issues.
• No TV station this fall spent less than 10 minutes per hour on campaigns. Last March the average was just under three minutes.

The charts below show a Swiss-cheese pattern. Rather than providing consistent help across the ballot, some contests received enormous attention, at the expense of others. It might seem appropriate to devote the lion's share of space or time to the presidential race, given the power of the office, but voters faced a bewildering array of state ballots and local measures and races that will affect their lives as profoundly as decisions made in the White House.

Elections come along infrequently and they represent the principal means of exercising citizenship. From our perspective, holes in the coverage represent missed opportunities for the news media to aid democracy.

Some of the inconsistency arises from where we looked: in print, just stories beginning on the front page, local news front, editorial page and special voter guides; in TV, an hour of the premiere evening newscast weekdays, a half-hour on weekends and any campaign specials. We focused on what we determined to be the most read and watched parts of the news.

However, some stations aired political reporting at other times of the day, and newspapers ran reports inside or in sections, such as business, that passed under our radar. Had those been included, some of the gaps we found might have been at least partially addressed.

The leaders

Two television stations rose above the rest in their efforts to provide meaningful, issue-centered coverage of this fall's campaigns: independent KTVU Channel 2 in Oakland and KNTV Channel 11, the NBC station in San Jose. Each spent about eight minutes per hour on the issues during its premier evening newscast.

Not far behind was ABC station KGO Channel 7, at seven and a half minutes per hour, followed by five minutes apiece on the other two San Francisco TV news stations, CBS's KPIX Channel 5 and the independent KRON Channel 4.

Among newspapers, the Mercury News and the Times both added substantially to their issue coverage by producing Sunday voter guides before the election.

Because we looked at stories in those guides, they did better on that measure than did the San Francisco Chronicle, which also increased its coverage but chose not to produce a voter guide this time. The Chronicle's political editor, Jim Brewer, said the paper shifted its coverage to inside pages and its Friday and Insight sections this year because a voter guide would come too late for absentee and early voters.

Our study

Grade the News' content analysis of campaign coverage from early October to early November was the most intense quantitative project we've ever conducted. We examined the eight most popular local news media every day for four weeks. We judged 1,150 stories to determine which races were being covered; whether they were about the issues, "horse race" or logistics of the election; the number of sources; fairness and other characteristics.

We have been following this fall's campaign coverage incrementally and have released three previous analyses. See our first, second and third reports for trends we've noticed along the way. Stories were classified by Grade the News' three most experienced analysts. However, there was no formal reliability analysis conducted. Some editors and news directors responded to our preliminary analysis with comments about their approach and our methods.

 

Bay Area campaign reporting by type

News organization	Horse race	Logistics	Issues	Issues space/time	Total space/time
	35%	7%	58%	1.12 pp/day	1.93 pp/day
	16	15	71	1.60	2.26
	24	6	70	1.48	2.12
	22	15	63	7:52 (m:s/h)	12:30 (m:s/h)
	42	12	46	4:55	10:47
	43	12	45	5:02	11:11
	22	11	67	7:32	11:16
	20	21	58	7:57	13:38

See explanations in the fine print below.

Bay Area campaign reporting by contest

News organization	President	Cong- ress	State legis.	Local races	All state Props	Local ballot measures
	75%	3%	3%	4%	8%	4%
	47	4	12	15	11	10
	33	5	8	40	6	5
	58	14	3	3	16	7
	78	0	0	0	16	2
	81	1	0	0	14	2
	66	1	2	0	34	10
	46	1	11	6	21	16

 

Kudos

There was a lot of good journalism to admire. Among the highlights:

• The Times did a big public service by devoting a whopping 40% of its most prominent campaign coverage to local races, largely in the form of race summaries in its extensive 28-page broadsheet voter guide on Oct. 17.
• Channel 2 devoted 14% of its total campaign reporting time to congressional races. The station produced a "Meet the Candidates" program featuring six congressional hopefuls, and profiled both Democratic shoo-in Barbara Boxer and Republican long-shot Bill Jones for Senate. Randy Shandobil's interviews with both candidates were a model of informative, compelling television journalism. KTVU gave him time to visit with both candidates on the campaign trail and the air time to engage complexity in his report.
• In addition to its coverage of local and statewide candidates, Channel 11 led the pack on local ballot measures at 16% of its prime-time political coverage.

Responsible campaign news

Socially responsible journalism asks news outlets to become citizen advocates before key elections. When they did, you saw across-the-board attention to ballot decisions on county, regional and state measures, and relatively even coverage of presidential, congressional, legislative and county supervisor races. Less reporting on front pages and premiere evening newscasts might be expected of city council and school board contests because they affect fewer people.

Our study reveals a substantial imbalance. Three news outlets -- the Chronicle, Channel 4 and Channel 5 -- devoted at least three-fourths of what we determined to be their most prominent coverage to the presidential election, a race whose outcome in the California vote was an all-but-certain landslide for John Kerry. In addition, Channel 2 devoted more than half to the presidential race.

Meanwhile, local, regional and statewide ballot questions and candidates got far less attention. For example, we didn't see any stories on either Channel 4 or Channel 5 that focused just on candidates for local races or the state Legislature. By contrast, on Channel 11, those types of stories alone averaged 1 minute 48 seconds per hour of local news, or a combined 17% of the station's total campaign coverage.

Stacy Owen, news director at Channel 4, blamed Grade the News' methodology for the lack of local campaign news in the study, which picked up only 13% of the station's daily news offerings by focusing on its top-rated 9 p.m. news. "As part of our commitment to covering issues, and avoiding sound-bite journalism," she wrote in an e-mail, "we invited candidates from the Senate race and 14 congressional races to come to our studio and record :50 responses to two questions." Elements of those interviews ran from 7 to 9 a.m., at 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. The station also featured local ballot initiatives on its 5 p.m. broadcast.

One thing all the newsrooms should be proud of: Each produced prominent pieces on most the 16 statewide propositions, mostly emphasizing those dealing with stem cell research, reforming California's "three-strikes" criminal laws and expanding Indian gambling. Whether the time spent on those stories measured up against the flood of political advertisements will be the subject of a future analysis.

Timing

If the news were your advocate, you'd expect to see a gradually increasing intensity across the four weeks -- a high level from the start, increasing as Election Day approached. Here Bay Area media did well, though we did see a dip in total campaign coverage after the drama of the presidential and vice-presidential debates ended on Oct. 13. All the news outlets appropriately boosted their level of coverage in the final few days of the campaign.

Channel 2 provided consistent coverage every night at 10 p.m.: a county measure on funding for the fourth bore for the Caldecott Tunnel, a library tax in the South Bay, a measure on genetically engineered food in Marin and new regulations on marijuana clubs in Oakland. But like many editors, Ed Chapuis, Channel 2's news director, said it's always a challenge to make stories relevant "to all of our viewers, not just the ones who are voting on a measure. When we do a story about school bonds in Santa Clara County, it still needs to connect with viewers in Alameda. Our job is to tap into the universal appeal of an interest in the quality of education and safety in schools."

Kevin Keeshan, news director at Channel 7, stressed that his strategy was to emphasize statewide issues.

"We felt the best way to serve our broad audience of viewers in the nine-county Bay Area was to focus on the propositions, which is what we did," Mr. Keeshan wrote. "This was especially important since the governor had put so much stock in the passage of the budget bond measures.

"In November we had one legislative race of note which was truly contested, in the 21st Assembly district. We did five stories on that race, ranging from the candidates’ positions on the major issues to campaign spending to fact checking television ads and how both political parties were weighing in. There was no congressional race where the incumbent didn’t have an overwhelming registration advantage, which is why we chose to not profile those races."

Channel 7 did some good work. On Oct. 29, Willie Monroe did a very thorough story on Measure R in Berkeley and Measure Z in Oakland, both liberalizing marijuana use. Both sides got several chances to comment on each. The station also did a revealing story on why Bay Area congressional districts are so badly gerrymandered, and devoted two thoughtful “Beyond the Headlines” programs outside its regular newscasts to provide in-depth issue coverage. One, on Oct. 23, focused on several propositions in sit-down debates with advocates and detractors.

Of all the television stations, Channel 11 set out most systematically to provide campaign reporting as a public service. The station ran a series of "Political Postcards" live from locations scattered mostly across the East and South Bay. Many of them worked well. Some of them fell flat or got mired in minutiae that had nothing to do with the upcoming election. But they were generally informative.

And Channel 11 was the only station that we saw actually go into the issues of a local city council race. On Oct. 29, Garvin Thomas profiled four candidates vying to govern Campbell. Each of the four men was allowed time to outline his big issues.

'Enterprise'

From a citizen advocate, we would also expect a high level of "enterprise" reporting -- stories that take a step back from the events and announcements of the campaign trail to answer probing questions. In all the news organizations analyzed, enterprise reporting predominated, though channels 5, 4 and 2, in that order, were driven by events to the greatest degree. The most "enterprising," according to our measure, was Channel 7 in TV, with 73%, and the Times in print, with 78%.

The Chronicle did produce some superb enterprise reporting, including a five-day series called "Critical Condition," which examined the political aspects of the health care debate. Later it ran a three-day series on energy issues, highlighting the differences between the presidential candidates. The business section, which was not systematically analyzed, also ran a side-by-side comparison of the candidates on their technology platforms.

Another creative approach in the Chronicle was an Oct. 29 full-page spread featuring nine scholars' short essays titled, "Historians dissect war in Iraq." These articles were more informative than the usual candidate stump speech. The newsroom asked its own questions instead of taking dictation.

The two Knight Ridder papers, the Mercury News and the Times relied heavily on the company's Washington bureau for coverage of national races. "In the homestretch of the election season we wanted our presidential coverage to be issue-driven and we wanted to maintain a high degree of local election news," Chris Lopez, the managing editor of Contra Costa Newspapers, wrote in an e-mail.

Knight Ridder "did a particularly good job of focusing on issues in the presidential race rather than just 'horse-race stories,''' Mercury News Managing Editor David Satterfield noted in an e-mail. "That then gave us the time and resources to focus on state propositions and local races."

Overall coverage

In television, Channel 11 had the most coverage overall, at an average of 13 minutes 38 seconds per hour. Channel 2 clocked in at 12:30; Channel 7 at 11:16; Channel 5 at 11:11; and Channel 4 at 10:47. But the differences were more pronounced when separating out issues from voting logistics and so-called "horse race" or campaign strategy news.

Journalism reformers and communication scholars have for years emphasized that not all campaign coverage is created equal. Stories about the substance of debates, issues and qualifications are much more helpful to voters than are roundups of politicians' movements on the campaign trail and summaries of the latest polls. Coverage of logistics is also helpful, but only in making sure people vote, not helping them choose who and what to vote for.

A coalition of 30 public-interest groups -- as diverse as Common Cause and the Alliance for Better Campaigns, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops -- asked local television newsrooms to air two hours per week of issue-oriented campaign reporting between 5 p.m. and 11:35 p.m. from mid-September to Election Day.

Judging from their performance in their premiere evening newscasts, no Bay Area station would meet this standard.

This fall, a local coalition spearheaded by Media Alliance approached all five Bay Area English-language news stations, requesting they pledge to air the two hours per night. Channels 4, 5 and 7 met with the group, and seemed responsive, said Jeff Perlstein, Media Alliance's executive director. But none offered to sign a pledge.

"All three expressed willingness to follow-up and hear recommendations from the delegation," adding that they thought their coverage would be robust regardless of total time devoted to politics, Mr. Perlstein said. Channel 11 sent a similar response in a letter.

The fine print

Last two columns are calculated in pages per day and minutes:seconds per hour.

"Horse race" includes "other" category -- features that don't belong in either logistics or issues. "Issues" includes ad fact checks and endorsements.

Totals may not equal 100% due to rounding or the omission of stories about multiple contests.

For television we recorded the premiere evening newscast as chosen by the station. For newspapers we analyzed all political stories related to the election on the front page, the local section front, the editorial page, the front of the Sunday editorial section and all special campaign sections (e.g. voter guides). We noticed a number of political stories on inside pages of all three newspapers. These were not included because inside pages are less read than cover fronts; we wanted a measure of political coverage made salient to the reader. Because newscasts are so brief we considered all of their stories salient -- the equivalent of cover pages stories in print.

Starting on Oct. 19, we began to sample one hour of KPIX's evening newscasts -- the 6:30 p.m. and the first half of the 5-6 p.m. -- in order to have an hour per weeknight for all five stations. Earlier, Channel 5's hourly rate was computed on just the 6:30 newscast. Most weekend newscasts are 30 minutes long.

 

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