Midwest Local TV Newscasts Average 36 Seconds of Election Coverage in Typical 30-Minute Broadcast

Midwest Local TV Newscasts Average 36 Seconds of Election Coverage in Typical 30-Minute Broadcast

Campaign Strategy and Horserace Stories Dominate Limited Election Coverage by Local TV News in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan and Ohio

MADISON, Wis., Oct. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- In the month following the traditional Labor Day kickoff of the 2006 election campaign season, television stations in nine Midwest markets devoted an average of 36 seconds to election coverage during the typical 30-minute local news broadcast, a new analysis shows.

By contrast, the typical early- and late-evening local news broadcasts contained more than 10 minutes of advertising, over seven minutes of sports and weather, and almost two and a-half minutes of crime stories.

The analysis traces broadcast news coverage in media markets in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan and Ohio, all of them witnessing highly competitive campaigns for state office this year. Public opinion research consistently shows that voters rely on local television newscasts as their primary source of information about elections and politics.

The findings were reported today by the Midwest News Index (MNI), a new project of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's NewsLab. The Joyce Foundation of Chicago is funding the news analysis as part of an ongoing project examining democratic institutions and processes in the five-state region.

The UW NewsLab analysis captured up to one hour per night of the early- and late-evening broadcasts on 36 NBC, CBS, ABC and FOX affiliates in nine Midwest markets between September 7 and October 6. The analysis covered the largest media market and state capital city in each state: Chicago, Springfield, Detroit, Lansing, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Cleveland, Columbus, Madison and Milwaukee.

Highlights of the initial report include:

-- Of the more than 1,800 broadcasts analyzed by UW NewsLab (900 hours of
programming), 1,629 election related stories aired. These included
stories that were primarily about campaigns and elections and stories
that either tangentially included elections or that mentioned a
candidate running for office in November 2006.

-- Just over half of all broadcasts (56 percent) contained at least one
story that was primarily about elections, and the average length of
stories devoted primarily to elections was 68 seconds.

-- In coverage of elections, strategy and horserace stories vastly
outweighed substantive issue coverage by a margin of almost 3 to 1 (63
percent to 23 percent).

-- Gubernatorial coverage consumed a third of the airtime (34 percent)
devoted to election stories.

This initial report on pre-election coverage is the first in a series of analyses running through the summer of 2007 of how local news broadcasts cover politics and government. The duration of the study and its regional focus are unprecedented.

UW NewsLab is directed by UW-Madison political science professor Ken Goldstein. The state-of-the-art facility has the infrastructure, technical skill and supervisory capability to capture, clip, code, analyze and archive any media in any market -- domestic or international -- in real time. The Wisconsin NewsLab archives include data collected in the 2002 and 2004 national elections, and are the most comprehensive and systematic collection of campaign news coverage on local television stations ever gathered.

"Although it is the single greatest source of news information for most Americans, scholarly studies have consistently shown that citizens learn little from local news," Goldstein said. "The results from this study show why. There must be significant substantive content for learning to take place. This study, consistent with previous studies conducted at UW NewsLab, show that there is relatively little coverage of campaigns and elections on local news, and when coverage does occur, it tends to focus on horserace and strategy frames."

The Midwest News Index findings will be continually updated on the project Web site at http://www.mni.wisc.edu/ . The study will also produce a comprehensive, Web-based searchable archive available to journalists, scholars, civic organizations and others. A second report covering the final month of the campaign will be released in mid-November.

Lawrence Hansen, vice president of the Joyce Foundation, said he hoped the initial findings of the Midwest News Index would spur both station owners and their regulators to do a better job of fulfilling their public interest obligations in the final weeks before the elections.

"The airwaves -- like our national parks -- are owned by the American people, not, as is often mistakenly assumed, by broadcasters. The results of this study show that most broadcasters are retreating from their obligation to serve the public interest, including their responsibility to inform citizens so they can participate in the political process," said Hansen.

"Meanwhile television station owners reap millions of dollars from paid political advertising -- which in turn drives up the cost of running for office and makes candidates dependent on special interests and large donors willing to pick up the tab," Hansen said.

National and regional public opinion research consistently shows that local television news broadcasts are the leading source of information on government and politics, outpolling newspapers, radio and the Internet. For example, a recent survey of residents in the five Midwest states, commissioned by the Joyce Foundation, found that 69 percent of voters in the region "regularly watch local broadcast news," compared with 58 percent who read a daily or Sunday newspaper, 32 percent who use the Internet to get news and information and 30 percent who listen to talk radio.

Following is a chart illustrating a breakdown of the typical 30-minute local news broadcast in the nine markets covered by the Wisconsin NewsLab's Midwest News Index. Times reflect averages based on total broadcasts analyzed.

Typical 30 Minute Broadcast Breakdown

Category 9.7.06 - 10.6.06
Advertising 10 min 7 sec
Sports and weather 7 min 1 sec
Crime 2 min 27 sec
Other 2 min 18 sec
Local interest 2 min 1 sec
Teasers, bumpers, intros 1 min 46 sec
Non-campaign gov't news 1 min 6 sec
Health 1 min 4 sec
Business, economy 1 min 2 sec
Election coverage 36 sec
Foreign policy 23 sec
Unintentional injury 11 sec

(NOTE: Individual reports on each of the nine markets providing additional detail for each of the five states are attached and available at http://www.mni.wisc.edu/ and http://www.joycefdn.org/ .

ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN NEWSLAB AND THE MIDWEST NEWS INDEX: This report is released by the Wisconsin NewsLab of the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The principal investigators are Ken Goldstein, professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Wisconsin NewsLab and Wisconsin Advertising Project and Erika Franklin Fowler, Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Research Director of the Wisconsin NewsLab. The project is funded by a grant from The Joyce Foundation. In the four weeks following the traditional Labor Day kickoff of the 2006 election campaign (September 7th through October 6th), project staff captured local news on the ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC affiliates in 9 Midwest markets in five states (the capital city and the largest media market in the state): Minnesota (Minneapolis/St. Paul), Wisconsin (Madison and Milwaukee), Illinois (Chicago and Champaign/Springfield), Michigan (Detroit and Lansing), and Ohio (Cleveland and Columbus). This 9-market study of local news coverage of politics is part of a longer project that will examine the content of local news throughout the year, the most in-depth research on individual markets ever conducted ( http://www.mni.wisc.edu/ ).

The news programming was captured through a sophisticated market-based media server technology. Each day, digitally recorded video was sent over the Internet to the UW NewsLab servers overnight. The NewsLab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison ( http://www.polisci.wisc.edu/uwnewslab ) is a unique state-of-the art facility that has the infrastructure, technical skill, and supervisory capability to capture, clip, code, analyze and archive any media in any market -- domestic or international -- in real time. Video can be gathered, digitized, sorted and archived automatically by the InfoSite system, a media analysis product of CommIT Technology Solutions of Madison, Wisconsin ( http://www.commitonline.com/ ). This system includes a variety of automatic validation checks to ensure superior coding reliability and logical consistency. With over a terabyte of storage, the UW NewsLab servers manage data, encode and archive video, and serve content through one of many custom media analysis tools, both internally, and to the rest of the world via the Internet. The Midwest News Index director is Tricia Olsen. The University of Wisconsin Advertising Project ( http://www.polisci.wisc.edu/tvadvertising ) is also housed in the UW NewsLab facility, where it tracks real time political advertising flows across the nation.

ABOUT THE JOYCE FOUNDATION: Based in Chicago with assets of $830 million, the Joyce Foundation funds groups working to strengthen public policies and improve the quality of life in the Great Lakes region. Its Money and Politics program supports efforts to promote a well-functioning representative democracy with open and accountable government, informed citizen participation, competition of ideas and candidates, fair and equal application of the laws, a high level of public trust and protection of fundamental rights.

Other grant making areas for the Joyce Foundation are education, employment, the environment, gun violence prevention and culture. More information can be found at http://www.joycefdn.org/ .

Wisconsin NewsLab

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN - MADISON
Department of Political Science

Midwest News Index (MNI) Methodology

This report is released by the Wisconsin NewsLab of the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The principal investigators are Ken Goldstein, professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Wisconsin NewsLab and Wisconsin Advertising Project and Erika Franklin Fowler, Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Research Director of the Wisconsin NewsLab. The project is funded by a grant from The Joyce Foundation. In the four weeks following the traditional Labor Day kickoff of the 2006 election campaign (September 7th through October 6th), project staff captured local news on the ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC affiliates in 9 Midwest markets in five states (the capital city and the largest media market in the state): Minnesota (Minneapolis/St. Paul), Wisconsin (Madison and Milwaukee), Illinois (Chicago and Champaign/Springfield), Michigan (Detroit and Lansing), and Ohio (Cleveland and Columbus). This 9-market study of local news coverage of politics is part of a longer project that will examine the content of local news throughout the year, the most in-depth research on individual markets ever conducted ( http://www.mni.wisc.edu/ ).

The news programming was captured through a sophisticated market-based media server technology. Each day, digitally-recorded video was sent over the Internet to the UW NewsLab servers overnight. The NewsLab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison ( http://www.polisci.wisc.edu/uwnewslab ) is a unique state-of-the art facility that has the infrastructure, technical skill, and supervisory capability to capture, clip, code, analyze and archive any media in any market -- domestic or international -- in real time. Video can be gathered, digitized, sorted and archived automatically by the InfoSite system, a media analysis product of CommIT Technology Solutions of Madison, Wisconsin ( http://www.commitonline.com/ ). This system includes a variety of automatic validation checks to ensure superior coding reliability and logical consistency. With over a terabyte of storage, the UW NewsLab servers manage data, encode and archive video, and serve content through one of many custom media analysis tools, both internally, and to the rest of the world via the Internet. The Midwest News Index director is Tricia Olsen. The University of Wisconsin Advertising Project (www.polisci.wisc.edu/tvadvertising) is also housed in the UW NewsLab facility, where it tracks real time political advertising flows across the nation.

Research Design

In the 60 days preceding Election Day, UW NewsLab will examine up to an hour a day from each of the four major stations in all 9 Midwest media markets covering 10 percent of the nation's population. Over the rest of the year UW NewsLab will randomly sample 8,760 broadcasts (33 percent) from a sampling frame of up to an hour a day from each station (two half-hour or one hour long broadcast) aired over the course of the year. Throughout the entire study, the Wisconsin NewsLab will also analyze national news.

Capture

The process of capturing local news data begins by placing servers in each media market. We placed servers in 9 markets (Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Lansing, Madison, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Springfield), which capture up to an hour of news programming: generally the 5pm and 10pm broadcasts from ABC, CBS, and NBC for markets in Central Time, the 6pm and 11pm broadcasts from ABC, CBS, and NBC for markets in Eastern Time, and up to an hour of Fox at 9pm in CST and 10pm in EST. Once the video is electronically captured, all segments are sent over the internet to the University of Wisconsin NewsLab servers. For the 2006 study, the system is capturing over 250 hours of local news content each week.

The sample is not a sample of all local television news broadcasts in the Midwest and therefore does not allow this study to speak to the content of all Midwest local news programming. It is, however, a sample of some of the highest-rated programming from the capitol city and largest media market in five Midwestern states, allowing us to make generalizable comparisons among and between states in the sample.

The NewsLab system captured on average 96 percent of targeted broadcasts, a notably high rate. In 8 out of 9 markets, the average station capture rate equaled or exceeded 95 percent. A full listing of each individual station capture rate can be found in the appendix.

There is no reason to suspect that there are systematic differences between the overall findings about regularly scheduled news broadcasts reported here and the missing data. Even so, the findings in this report are based only on the broadcasts and campaign news stories actually watched and analyzed by project staff. The majority of the report contains overall percentages and averages which, given the high capture rate, are unlikely to be significantly affected by missing data. Broadcasts analyzed in this report aired from September 7 through October 6, 2006. Television news broadcasts are often pre-empted or replaced by late-running sporting events, particularly on weekends. As a result, the number of broadcasts for each station is based on broadcasts where the regular news programs actually aired, not on the number of broadcasts a station would have aired without being pre-empted or replaced.

Clipping, Coding, and Archiving

In the initial step of the analysis, all news segments are clipped into individual stories and categorized by story topic (1). Trained "clippers" use the system to mark the beginning and end of each story, code it by primary and secondary foci and then automatically send each story to a "coding" queue, where it is assigned to a trained, student coder. At this juncture, all election-related news stories are coded on a variety of information including story length, office focus (gubernatorial, senatorial, etc), candidates covered, tone of story (positive, negative, balanced and value neutral) and length of candidate sound bites. Once stories have been captured, clipped and coded, they are sent automatically to a web-based searchable archive. All 2006 election related stories are available for users to search the video database on a host of items including: keywords, story subject, station, market, date aired, tone of coverage as well as other project-specific items (such as candidates mentioned for elections, etc) to name a few. UW NewsLab also uses inter-coder reliability (ICR) statistics. This process assures that our coders, independent of one another, are coding in a similar fashion.

Reliability Mechanisms

Multiple checks are employed to guarantee data reliability. These checks ensure a dataset in which all variables are complete and consistent: 1) the system requires data to pass automatic logic checks before submitting stories into the coding system; 2) a series of filters are used to flag data that contains seemingly contradictory answers for supervisor review; and 3) inter- coder reliability (ICR) is constantly monitored to ensure the consistency and reliability of the data (2). Through the comparison of these two answer sets, we are able to track the consistency and accuracy of our data.

UW NewsLab Staff
Kenneth Goldstein - Principal Investigator

Ken Goldstein is a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project ( http://www.polisci.wisc.edu/tvadvertising ) and the University of Wisconsin NewsLab. Goldstein received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1996 with a focus on American politics and research methodology. He is the author of Interest Groups, Lobbying, and Participation in America, published by Cambridge University Press, and recently completed a book on the impact of television advertising. He is also at work on a book under contract with Princeton University Press on the targeting of campaign activity and television advertising in the 2004 campaign. In addition, his research on political communication and local news, news coverage of health issues and unintentional injuries, voter turnout, survey methodology, Israeli politics, and presidential elections has appeared in over 25 refereed journal articles and book chapters.

Goldstein's reputation for unbiased and non-partisan analysis has made him a favorite source for politicians and the news media alike. He has appeared numerous times on Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Nightline, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, FOX News Channel, MSNBC, CNBC and CNN, and is a frequent contributor on National Public Radio. He is also quoted extensively in the country's top newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. His expert testimony was also used in the litigation and Supreme Court decision on BCRA.

Erika Franklin Fowler - Principal Investigator

Erika Franklin Fowler is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and the Research Director of the Wisconsin NewsLab. She is completing a dissertation about the political content and effectiveness of local television news coverage of elections in which she concludes that political advertisements actually have more substantive information and a more consistent effect on citizen knowledge, perceptions of the campaign and turnout than local television news messages. Fowler has also published several pieces on political communication and free media in particular, including a book chapter on effects of free media in campaigns with Ken Goldstein, an article with Ken Goldstein, Marty Kaplan and Matthew Hale to appear in an upcoming volume of Stanford Law & Policy Review and an analysis of health news on local television (with Ken Goldstein and medical researchers at the University of Michigan) published in the American Journal of Managed Care

A summa cum laude graduate of St. Olaf College with a B.A. in political science and mathematics, Fowler has worked with the Wisconsin NewsLab since its inception in 2002.

Tricia Olsen - MNI Project Director

A graduate student at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, Tricia Olsen has worked with the Wisconsin NewsLab since the fall of 2004. She is the Project Director for UW NewsLab and will run the Midwest News Index, the first and most systematic project to track a full year of news coverage in nine Midwestern markets. Olsen is also responsible for overseeing Spanish-language coding and writing and administering foundation grants for UW NewsLab. Olsen graduated from Carleton College with a B.A. in Latin American Studies and a minor in Political Science, where she refined her Spanish and Portuguese language skills. She earned her M.A. in Political Science from UW - Madison in 2006. Her research interests include Latin American politics, methodology, and transnational social movements and networks.

(1) During the clipping phase, a custom software application, Infosite, (a
product of CommIT Technology Solutions, Inc.) automatically retrieved
each piece of video and linked the video record to data collected by
Wisconsin NewsLab staff, reducing human error. UW NewsLab staff had
the ability to rewind, fast forward and pause the video while
answering questions about the recorded content.

(2) ICR is checked by randomly selecting a percentage of completed stories
to be recoded by a second individual. The two sets of answers are
compared both in terms of percent agreement but also (and more
importantly) by computing a chance-corrected reliability statistic
such as Scott's Pi and Krippendorff's R depending on the nature of the
variable being compared. Each coder is monitored and supervisors
continually give feedback to UW NewsLab staff to ensure a high overall
level of ICR.

APPENDIX

INDIVIDUAL STATION CAPTURE RATES

MARKET STATION NETWORK VIDEO CAPTURE RATE
Chicago WLS1 ABC 100.0%
Chicago WBBM CBS 98.3%
Chicago WFLD FOX 100.0%
Chicago WMAQ NBC 100.0%
Cleveland WEWS ABC 100.0%
Cleveland WOIO CBS 100.0%
Cleveland WJW1 Fox 96.7%
Cleveland WKYC NBC 100.0%
Columbus WSYX ABC 96.7%
Columbus WBNS CBS 93.3%
Columbus WTTE FOX 93.3%
Columbus WCMH NBC 96.7%
Detroit WXYZ ABC 95.0%
Detroit WWJ CBS No news
Detroit WJBK Fox 93.3%
Detroit WDIV NBC 96.7%
Lansing WLAJ ABC 100.0%
Lansing WLNS CBS 86.7%
Lansing WSYM FOX 100.0%
Lansing WILX NBC 91.7%
Madison WKOW ABC 95.0%
Madison WISC CBS 96.7%
Madison WMSN FOX 96.7%
Madison WMTV NBC 96.7%
Milwaukee WISN ABC 83.3%
Milwaukee WDJT CBS 80.0%
Milwaukee WITI Fox 90.0%
Milwaukee WTMJ NBC 81.7%
Minneapolis KSTP ABC 98.3%
Minneapolis WCCO CBS 98.3%
Minneapolis KMSP FOX 100.0%
Minneapolis KARE NBC 98.3%
Springfield WICS ABC 98.3%
Springfield WCIA CBS 98.3%
Springfield WRSP FOX 100.0%
Springfield WAND NBC 96.7%
Overall 95.6%

First Call Analyst:
FCMN Contact:

Source: The Joyce Foundation

CONTACT: Jeff Valenzuela, The Joyce Foundation, P: +1-312-573-5495, or
C: +1-414-405-1023

Web site: http://www.mni.wisc.edu/
http://www.polisci.wisc.edu/uwnewslab
http://www.polisci.wisc.edu/tvadvertising
http://www.joycefdn.org/

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