Most Local TV Stations Aired Less Than One Minute Per Night of Candidates Discussing Issues Before Election, USC Annenberg School/Norman Lear Center Study Says.

News Editors

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 5, 2001

Five-Minute-Per-Night Goal Eludes All but One Broadcaster, Finds 74-Station Study of Political News Coverage in Last Month of Campaign

A survey of campaign 2000 news coverage by 74 broadcast television stations in 58 media markets, conducted by the USC Annenberg School for Communication's Norman Lear Center, has found that most stations aired an average of 45 seconds of candidate discourse per night during the recent election.

"Forty-five seconds is barely enough time to clear your throat," said Martin Kaplan, director of the Lear Center and associate dean of the USC Annenberg School.

But the study, measuring "candidate centered discourse" (CCD), revealed that stations committed to a 5-minute-per-night voluntary public interest standard, recommended by the 1998 report of the Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital TV Broadcasters, broadcast three times as much candidate discourse as those ignoring the standard.

"The good news is that stations committed to the 5-minute standard not only aired more candidate discourse," added Kaplan, who served as principal investigator of the study, "they also aired more issue stories, 60 percent longer candidate soundbites and a higher percentage of stories about state and local elections."

The study measured the total time that all candidates for all levels of office were shown speaking on local stations from 5 p.m. to 11:35 p.m. during the 30 days before the election.

Seven percent of the nation's 1,300 television stations announced that they would attempt to meet the 5-minute standard. Researchers found that the 23 stations they studied which had publicly committed to the 5-minute standard aired an average of 2 minutes 17 seconds of CCD per night.

The 51 stations they studied which were not committed to the 5-minute standard aired an average of 45 seconds of CCD per night.

Four of the top five CCD stations in the study are owned by E.W. Scripps: KNXV, Phoenix (5 minutes 44 seconds); WPTV, Palm Beach, Fla. (4 minutes 3 seconds); WCPO, Cincinnati (3 minutes 38 seconds); and KJRH, Tulsa, Okla. (3 minutes 16 seconds). WRAL, Raleigh, N.C., owned by Capitol Broadcasting, aired an average of 3 minutes 38 seconds a night.

The study also evaluated quality using other measures beyond CCD. Along with stations mentioned above, good performances were also turned in by KCRA, Sacramento, Calif. (Hearst-Argyle); WXYZ, Detroit, (E.W. Scripps); WTVJ, Miami (NBC); and WCVB, Boston (Hearst-Argyle).

At the bottom of the CCD list were a Fox station (WBRC, Birmingham, Ala.) and two A.H. Belo stations (KTVK, Phoenix and WVEC, Norfolk, Va.) offering 14 seconds a night; WFMY, Greensboro, N.C., a Gannett station with 7 seconds a night; WSOC, Charlotte, N.C., a Cox station with 6 seconds a night; and at the very bottom KWTV, Oklahoma City, a Griffin station with 2 seconds a night.

The study was conducted under a Ford Foundation grant to the Alliance for Better Campaigns, which engaged the Lear Center to perform the research. The full text of the findings can be found at the Lear Center's Web site at http://entertainment.usc.edu/publications/campaignnews.pdf.

The Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital TV Broadcasters, co-chaired by CBS President Leslie Moonves and political scientist Norman Ornstein, was established by presidential executive order in 1997.

Known informally as the Gore Commission, it was a nonpartisan attempt to consider what the industry owed the country in return for receiving an estimated $70 billion worth of new broadcast spectrum as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Its members included representatives from the communication industry, academia and civic groups. Its December 1998 final report recommended that "the television broadcasting industry should voluntarily provide 5 minutes each night for candidate-centered discourse in the thirty days before an election," and it added that this effort "should begin in 2000, allowing experimentation with formats and lengths to go on before the digital era."

The text of the Gore Commission's recommendation on candidate discourse can be found at www.benton.org/PIAC/rec6.html.

Related materials can be found at the Alliance for Better Campaigns Web site, www.bettercampaigns.org. The alliance is a national nonprofit organization promoting political campaigns in which the most useful information reaches the greatest number of citizens in the most engaging ways.

The Norman Lear Center is a multidisciplinary research and public policy center exploring implications of the convergence of entertainment, commerce and society. The impact of entertainment on news and journalism is a principal focus of its work.