This article, entitled, "Local TV news doesn't share the public interest", may not shock anyone, but it's instructive to the extent it shows how TV newscasters are forgoing the public interest to cultivate an aging, internet-phobic viewership:
From what a USC Norman Lear Center study has concluded -- Los Angeles television news stations manage just 22 seconds of local government coverage for every half hour on the air...
Wow, 22 whopping seconds. It takes me longer to put on my seatbelt.
Not to pick on LA, but apparently they fare the worst. The average local TV newscast devotes slightly more time... but under ten minutes:
In each 30-minute segment, more than eight minutes go to advertising. An additional 7 1/2 minutes focus on stories outside Southern California. Sports, weather and teasers (touting the dreck scheduled later that hour, day or week) take up a total of nearly six minutes.
The eight remaining minutes might amount to something worthwhile. But they get frittered away too -- mostly with soft features and, especially, coverage of the latest murder or string of burglaries.
Try to recall an evening newscast that didn't include an animal in a predicament or at least one story gift-wrapped in yellow police tape. A regular diet of this stuff might reasonably have you cowering in your house. Never mind that statistics (so meddlesome, those numbers that provide context) show crime in fairly sharp decline in recent years.
The takeaway is that national news and puff stories (pets, kids) hog the stage on local newscasts. Local papers aren't much better. Local news bloggers are just filling a void, then. One wonders what would happen if these professional news outlets reasserted themselves into this space.
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