Buying Reality

Political Ads, Money, and Local Television News

Danilo Yanich

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780823288977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From a certain perspective, the biggest political story of 2016 was how the candidate who bought three-quarters of the political ads lost to the one whose every provocative Tweet set the agenda for the day's news coverage. With the arrival of bot farms, microtargeted Facebook ads, and Cambridge Analytica, isn't the age of political ads on local TV coming to a close?You might think. But you'd be wrong to the tune of $4.4 billion just in 2016. In U.S. elections, there's a lot more at stake than the presidency. TV spending has gone up dramatically since 2006, for both presidential and down-ballot races for congressional seats, governorships, and state legislatures—and the 2020 campaign shows no signs of bucking this trend. When candidates don't enjoy the name recognition and celebrity of the presidential contenders, it's very much business as usual. They rely on the local TV newscasts, watched by 30 million people every day—not Tweets—to convey their messages to an audience more fragmented than ever. At the same time, the nationalization of news and consolidation of local stations under juggernauts like Nexstar Media and Sinclair Broadcasting mean a decreasing share of time devoted to down-ballot politics—almost 90 percent of 2016's local political stories focused on the presidential race. Without coverage of local issues and races, ad buys are the only chance most candidates have to get their messages in front of a broadcast audience. On local TV news, political ads create the reality of local races—a reality that is not meant to inform voters but to persuade them. Voters are left to their own devices to fill in the space between what the ads say—the bought reality—and what political stories used to cover.

1

Why Local Television News Matters

Tip O’Neill, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, once famously said, “All politics is local.” What he meant was that the political decisions that have the most impact on our lives are local. Policy preferences about crime and justice, housing, taxes, education, health, and employment, among many others, are implemented at the local level. Even in this age of instant communications and globalization, we often lose sight of the fact that we live our lives in local places.

Sizable Audience

Even though the overall audience has decreased over time, as it has for all broadcast television, television news still has a sizable audience—especially in comparison with cable news. Between 2007 and 2016, the audience for the late-night newscasts on the four network affiliate stations (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC) decreased, on average, from about 30 million to about 20 million viewers. The early evening newscast audience decreased from about 27 million to about 20 million viewers in that same time period, while the morning newscasts maintained an audience of about 10 million viewers during that time span (Matsa 2018).

In contrast, in 2016 the average number of televisions that were tuned to the evening news programs on cable for CNN, Fox, and MSNBC was 1.3 million. For their daytime news programs, the audience dropped to about 800,000 television households. Further, when it comes to local issues, local television consistently has a larger share of the audience than their cable counterparts. The size of the television audience is expressed in ratings and shares. A rating is the percentage of households watching a program based on all of the television households in the market. A share, however, is the percentage of households who have their television on and who are watching a specific program. For example, KUTV in Salt Lake City had an audience share of eight whereas the audience share in that market for the typical cable news varies between one (for Anderson Cooper) and three (for O’Reilly and Hannity) (Glassman 2017).

Looking at the raw numbers for the nation, local news has an average daily audience of 18.1 million viewers (Matsa and Fedeli 2018). The top three cable networks—CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC—have a combined daily average of 1.9 million viewers (Grieco 2018).

Still, the local news television audience is slowly declining, albeit not consistently across all television markets (Wenger and Papper 2018). Even as online news consumption increases, television remains the dominant news source for Americans—half of US adults get their news from television, compared to online (43 percent), radio (25 percent), and newspapers (18 percent) (Gottfried and Shearer 2017). Local news reaches almost half of adults over 18 (46 percent), significantly more than national broadcast news (39 percent) and more than twice as much as cable news (22 percent) (Nielsen 2017). It also skews younger than national broadcast news or cable news; albeit the proportion of viewers who are 18 to 34 years of age is only 8 percent compared to 19 percent for viewers aged 35 to 49, they are higher than either of its broadcast competitors. A substantial majority of the audiences for all three sources is over fifty. However, among the three, local news has the lowest proportion of an audience that is 50 or older (73 percent) compared to national broadcast news (76 percent) and cable news (81 percent) (Nielsen 2017).

As we move up the age ladder from the 18 to 29 age group to 65 or older, the proportion of the cohort that gets most of its local news from television rises from 22 to 67 percent (Mitchell et al. 2016). That pattern also holds for citizens who follow local news “very closely”—15 percent for the 18 to 29 age group and up to 42 percent for those 65 and older (Barthel, Grieco, and Shearer 2019). On the other hand, the local news audience in some markets is increasing as the baby boomer population ages, and they continue to retain their news viewing habits (Wenger and Papper 2018).

The attention that older Americans direct to local news has implications for local politics and elections. Consistently, these viewers vote more than any other age cohort in the nation. In 2018, for example, the voting turnout rate for citizens 60 and older was 66 percent, the highest for any age group. And, it was double the proportion of the 18-to 29-year-olds (United States Election Project 2019).

The local news audience tends to be female (57 percent) rather than male (43 percent), and it tends to be lower on the income scale than either national broadcast or cable news—almost one-fifth have yearly incomes below $25,000 compared to just 11 percent in that category for cable viewers. Furthermore, local news audiences have the smallest proportion of viewers earning more than $75,000 per year (34 percent), compared to cable (47 percent) and national broadcast news (37 percent) (Nielsen 2017).

Average Viewing Time

There is a lot of local news. In fact, as of 2017, there are 1,072 local television stations in the United States that air local newscasts for an average of almost 6 hours per day on weekdays, an all-time high. On weekends, that number drops to an average of about 2 hours (Papper 2018). Put differently, on any weekday in the United States, the public has access to over 6,400 hours of local news broadcasts. That is an immense amount of content.

The audience spends significant time watching television news. Nielsen reports that, in its local people meter markets, adults watch, on average, almost 6 hours of news per week (Nielsen 2017). The average time spent per week on each type of television news source (local, national broadcast, cable) only differs by two minutes for local and cable news, 2:21 and 2:23, respectively (Nielsen 2017). However, local news viewers are diverse, and there is a substantial difference in the amount of time that racial and ethnic groups devote to viewing. African Americans comprise about one-fifth of the audience of local television news, but they spend the most time per week watching, on average, just over 7 hours (7:17). White viewers make up 71 percent of the local news audience, and they watch for just over 6 hours per week (6:12). Hispanic and Asian viewers, who account for 13 and 4 percent of the audience, watch about 3 hours (2:57) and 2.5 hours (2:25), respectively (Nielsen 2017).

In six of the ten markets, viewers spent more time watching local TV news than either cable or national news (fig. 1.1). In Cleveland, the average per week was almost 3.5 hours (3:27). The weekly average in San Francisco for watching local TV news was just over 2 hours (2:05). In Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Tampa, the audience watched more cable news (Nielsen 2017).

Figure 1.1. Average time per week devoted to news types (h:mm). Source: Nielsen Local Watch Report, Q1 2017: Television Trends in Our Cities.

Primary Source for Local Information

In 2011 a comprehensive report by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) catalogued the shortcomings of local television news (Waldman 2011). The report also found that many stations genuinely strive to serve their communities with information that is important to citizens in the face of the reportorial gaps that have been left by the decline of newspapers. The report states that they are not where they need to be to fill that role but, given their local focus, “in many ways, local TV news is more important than ever” (13).

Local television news far outpaces other media as the primary source of local and regional news. Forty-four percent of the public got their news from local television; 12 percent turned to its closest competitor, newspapers; and 5 percent said they get their news from social media (TVB and Keller Fay Group 2015).

The FCC found that “there is an identifiable set of basic information needs that individuals need met to navigate everyday life, and that communities need to have met in order to thrive” (Friedland et al. 2012, v). They identified eight categories: emergencies and risks, health and welfare, education, transportation, economic opportunities, the environment, civic information and political life (Friedland et al. 2012). Moreover, based on the FCC’s regulatory principle of localism, local television is the perfect vehicle to meet these informational needs (Sohn and Schwartzman 1994).

In considering the needs of communities in a democracy, the Knight Commission (2009) stated that community functions depend on information and exchange and that they need to accomplish four things that depend on information. Communities need to coordinate elections activities; they must solve problems that face them; they must establish systems of public accountability; and they must develop a sense of connectedness.

In each of the characterizations of critical information needs, both the FCC and the Knight Commission recognize that journalism is the critical intermediating practice that makes the overwhelming exchange of information possible for communities.

Most-Trusted News Source

A key factor in the relevance of any institution is whether the public trusts its work. For the media, in general, trust has taken a real hit. According to the Knight Foundation (2018), almost seven out of ten US adults say that they have lost trust in the media over the last ten years, and there is a significant divide between conservatives (95 percent) and liberals (46 percent). The overwhelming reasons that are given for the decline revolve around inaccuracy (seen as inaccurate/misleading reporting, alternative facts, fake news) and bias. However, 69 percent of the public also believe that trust can be restored.

There is some nuance to the findings. Rather than not trusting any media, two-thirds of the public indicates that it trusts only some media and not others. That includes 64 percent of Democrats and 75 percent of Republicans (Knight Foundation 2018). This may help explain the trust levels that are reported for local TV news. Most of the public (79 percent) trusts the news it gets from their local television stations and the significant majority (67 percent) say that they reference or repeat those news reports; that level of trust is consistent across Democrats (82 percent) and Republicans (80 percent) (TVB and Keller Fay Group 2015).

According to the Video Advertising Bureau (2018), television is identified as the most trusted source of accurate political information for adults in the United States—at 61 percent it outperforms newspapers (47 percent) and social media (31 percent). The difference is even more striking when it comes to forming an opinion about key issues—at 68 percent television news consumers are more opinionated than newspaper readers (18 percent) and social media followers (21 percent).

An increasing number of Americans get their news from social media sites. Elisa Shearer and Elizabeth Grieco (2019) found that Facebook is the most popular site with 52 percent of Americans using it, followed by YouTube which is used by 28 percent of Americans. However, Americans’ evaluation of the news they get from these sites is tempered. Six out of ten say that social media companies have too much control over the news that people see and over half of them say that the control results in a worse mix of news for users.

In general, local television news is viewed as the least likely source of fake news. In a list of twenty-five news sources ranked in terms of likelihood to deliver fake news, only 8 percent of those surveyed viewed local television as a likely source of fake news. By contrast, Facebook was at the top of the list (58 percent), followed closely by Internet news sites (51 percent) and Twitter (45 percent). Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC were tied at 24 percent. The New York Times was at 17 percent. Local newspapers, CBS’s 60 Minutes and Face the Nation, and NPR were tied at 11 percent, and the PBS News Hour was at 9 percent (Statista 2019a).

The trust of television news extends across countries even as the use of social media and online sources has increased. Nic Newman, David Levy, and Rasmus Nielsen (2015) in their study of the news habits across twelve developed countries, including the United States, found that social media users value television news for accuracy and reliability (37 percent) over social media (12 percent). Further, “social media are not seen as a destination for accurate and reliable journalism but more as a way of getting access to it” (11).

There is a startling disconnect between the overall trust in news in the United States and the public’s interest in it. Out of the twelve countries in Newman, Levy, and Nielsen’s study, the United States came in last in overall trust in news—only 32 percent said that they trusted the news they get. Yet 67 percent stated that they were interested in local television news. Compared to fifteen other television, radio, and print sources, local television news scored the highest proportion of weekly usage (39 percent), followed by Fox News (32 percent). Even when compared to online sources, local television news sites were used weekly by 16 percent of the public, the fourth highest among the sources with the highest being Yahoo at 23 percent.

Ironically, the Russian disinformation effort during the 2016 campaign sought to capitalize on Americans’ trust in local news. The Internet Research Agency (IRA) is a Kremlin-linked Russian troll farm and 30 percent of the URLs that it posted linked to local media outlets (Yin et al. 2018). Operatives who worked in the IRA in St. Petersburg created a number of Twitter accounts that posed as sources for Americans’ hometown headlines. They had names such as @ElPasoTopNews, @MilwaukeeVoice, @CamdenCityNews, and @Seattle_Post (Mak and Berry 2018).

Civic and Political Engagement

The relationship between citizenship and democracy is fraught with challenges. James Madison put the point starkly: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives” (quoted in Lloyd 2006, 11). However, there have been competing views about whether the people are up to the task of informing themselves to be capable democratic citizens. In fact, much of the evidence points to the deficiencies of citizens and to the drastic shortcomings of the media system to provide the “means to acquire” the necessary information for democracy to succeed. The characterizations are blunt: We have “democracy without citizens” (Entman 1996); America’s uninformed citizens are our “dirty little secret” (Blumberg 1990, quoted in Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996, 23); the structure of the media system and its current form of news coverage get in the way of Americans doing their job as citizens (Fallows 1996; McChesney 2012).

Yet, in the face of these difficulties, the United States has been a stable democracy for more than two centuries and that has led some scholars to refer to the “paradox of modern democracy” (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996, 22). They point to the information shortcuts that Americans use to inform their decisions. These “shortcuts—or heuristics—involve distancing oneself from the raw data by depending of someone else’s synthesis of a particular issue or candidate” (51). As a result, the public can navigate through information regarding three broad areas of necessary political knowledge—the rules of the game, the substance of politics, and people and parties (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). The information-seeking behavior of the public is circumscribed by the media environment that surrounds it. Citizens cannot, of their own devices, discern the rules of the game, the substance of politics, or people and parties without a mediating system doing the work of gathering the information. That mediating system is my concern here. The news matters. It is the “hard-wiring of our democracy” (Hargreaves and Thomas 2002, 4)—especially in local places; and when it is diminished or absent altogether, its effect is immediate.

The local information environment affects political participation (O’Neill 2010). Absent local news, voters are less likely to turn out (Filla and Johnson 2010). But they are affected differently by different media. Matthew Gentzkow (2006) argues that television, because it is more focused on entertainment than news, reduces the consumption of newspapers and links its introduction into the local media system to lower political knowledge and voter turnout. Jesper Strömbäck and Adam Shehata (2018) show that there is a reciprocal relationship between political interest and watching public service but not commercial news. Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless (2015; 2018) connect the decline in local coverage, particularly in US House races, to decreased citizen engagement. Marc Hooghe (2002) and Heejo Keum (2004) argue that the types of programs, entertainment versus news, affects the civic-mindedness of viewers. A cross-national study showed that exposure to news outlets with high levels of political content (such as public television and broadsheet newspapers) contributes most to political knowledge. But that is “contingent” on the person’s preexisting level of knowledge (de Vreese and Boomgaarden 2006).

The use of local media has a decided positive effect on community integration, particularly for local television. That community integration is linked to local political interest, knowledge, and participation (McLeod et al. 1996). Further, the use of local television news is associated with the civic duty to keep oneself informed (Poindexter and McCombs 2001).

Against the backdrop of the connection between media and citizenship, Jeffrey Jones (2006) argues that the study of media and politics is flawed by its three central assumptions: that news is the primary and proper sphere of political communication; that the most important function of media is to supply citizens with information; and that political engagement must necessarily be associated with physical activity. He proposes that we should look beyond the “instrumental orientation” of the media to an understanding of how the public integrates its media usage—a cultural view (365).

Whatever cultural media processes are at work, the public does use mass media as a place for political information. And they expect information to be there. Even in this social media–connected world, eight out of ten political conversations happen the old-fashioned way, face-to-face (TVB and Keller Fay Group 2015). That makes sense because the richness of face-to-face interaction is perfectly suited to contested and controversial topics. And the conversation often starts with television. Trust turns to influence as 61 percent of the public (significantly higher than any other news source) say that they refer to local television stories they receive in their daily conversations (TVB and Keller Fay Group 2015). Indeed, “TV, especially local TV, is the biggest content source for poli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1. Why Local Television News Matters
• 2. A Brief History of Political Advertising
• 3. Research Method and Market Profiles
• 4. Political Ads
• 5. Political Stories
• 6. The Markets
• 7. The Business of News
• Conclusion: Where Do We Go from Here?
• Acknowledgments
• Reference List
• Index