Not Just Sinclair: Sixteen Years of Local Television News in the US

• In Event: Changes in Local News and Their Political Impacts

Abstract

During the 2000 US elections, we conducted a content analysis of local television news in the Minneapolis/St. Paul DMA in Minnesota, a social capital capital that we argued should provide relatively high quality news about state and local level issues and campaigns. We did not find this. We showed local television news to be dominated by the presidential race. We also found that news on the four stations we analysed seemed to be driven more by following the ratings leader than by real world developments. Over the next sixteen years, we conducted similar content analysis of the 2004, 2008 and 2016 elections on local news in Minnesota. In this paper, we present analysis of coverage of over 5000 election-related stories we coded over the four elections. The research question we address is: To what extent has coverage of elections changed or stayed the same on local television, and with what implications? Studies of local newspapers over this time period refer to “news deserts” in many parts of America and to a decline in resources for localized coverage. But there have been no similar studies, to our knowledge, of local television news, despite the fact that the average number of daily hours devoted to it increased to an all time high of 6.2 hours in 2020. There has been some focus on the effects of growing Sinclair ownership of local stations, but this may only be a detail of a bigger picture. We use our sixteen years of data to ask: 1. In a period in which America has seen a decline in newspaper readership and the closure of local newspapers since 2000, has local television picked up the slack by devoting any more attention to downballot races? 2. To what extent have there been changes in the quality of coverage, which we operationalize as the amount of time given to direct speech from candidates and to issues? 3. Was our finding that stations tend to “follow the leader” repeated in subsequent elections?
Our data show trends in which local television news devotes less rather than more attention to downballot elections than it did in 2000. We also show that coverage of issues has become even less likely, and less in-depth when issues are covered, than in 2000, belying local broadcasters’ regular claims that they “go beyond the soundbites.” However, we do not find evidence that coverage of candidates has deteriorated, in the sense that candidates were mentioned as often in 2016 as in 2000 and that we hear directly from the candidate themselves as often. Finally, our analysis of intermedia agenda-setting is preliminary, but although we find evidence of stations influencing each other, the pattern of following the ratings leaders does not seem to have been repeated in subsequent elections. We ask why and what does seem to account for stations’ influence on each other.
The implications of our analysis are several. Given that none of the four stations in the Minneapolis/St. Paul DMA is owned by Sinclair, one implication—featured in the paper title—is that developments in local news such as nationalization of political coverage, are not just due to Sinclair ownership. But perhaps the most important implication for the conference theme pertains to democratic retrenchment in the US. Our findings have negative implications for political accountability. Minneapolis/St. Paul still sustains two city newspapers, The Star Tribune and Pioneer Press in an era when many cities and towns in America that once had several competing newspapers now have one or none. Previous research suggests a relationship in which sharing of reporting norms and of resources between local newspapers and television leads to more (and better) coverage of sub-presidential politics. Thus, two city newspapers and four local television stations would suggest that Minnesota remains relatively well-off in its potential to cover these politics. Yet we show there is very little coverage of this kind. In areas without local newspapers, norms and resources for the reporting of local politics are thus essentially the domain of local television alone: our analysis suggests that local television news stations are not fulfilling that domain effectively.

Authors

• Daniel Stevens, University of Exeter

• Barbara Allen, Carleton College

• Bjorn Holtey

• Beck Woollen, Carleton College