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In A need to vote with the remote, Tim Rutten presents the argument that local TV news coverage sucks. Not just here in LA, but nationally according to a study by the University of Southern California and the University of Wisconsin (PDF format document).
Color me shocked. Not.
What I found interesting were the comments by Martin Kaplan where he claims that much of the fault for declining news quality can be linked to consultants who move around frequently using the same arguments. Cut costs by reducing serious news coverage (which is ratings poison anyway). I don't know if he's right or not, but it seems to be so, as does the quote below.
I believe that entertainment -- the need to grab and hold audiences -- has come to dominate every other realm of contemporary American life, for better and for worse, from news and politics to education and religion.
Back to Mr. Rutten's article... This section from the article really bothers me.
"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?"
The article closes out by asking "Should we accept it?"
Do we have a choice? I stopped watching the local TV news a long time ago, voting with my remote as it were and it has had precisely zero affect. Or perhaps my defection and that of others had a negative affect, because the people left watching don't really care. C'est la vie!
Links:
http://www.localnewsarchive.org/