Sports and Weather, Crime, Fluff Dominate LA TV News

Los Angeles may be hemorrhaging red ink, but "if it bleeds it leads" doesn't apply to news coverage of its fiscal woes.

Though crime led local TV news in Los Angeles on one out of three broadcasts, stories about L.A.'s budget crisis topped local news only one time out of 100. An average half-hour of L.A. local news packed all its local government coverage -- including budget, law enforcement, education, layoffs, new ordinances, voting procedures, personnel changes, city and county government actions on health care, transportation and immigration ­ into 22 seconds. But crime stories filled 7 times more of the broadcast, averaging 2:50. Sports and weather took the most time: 3:36. Soft news ­ human interest, oddball stories and miscellaneous fluff ­ took up the next-largest chunk after crime, averaging 2:26.

Other highlights of the TV findings:

• Coverage of business and the economy in Los Angeles averaged 29 seconds. Teasers ("coming up on the Southland's best news...") lasted more than four times that amount (2:10).
• The time spent on ads (8:25), teasers, and sports and weather takes up nearly half of a typical half-hour of local news. Of the time left for everything else (15:44), almost half (8:17) was made up of stories taking place outside the L.A. media market.
• If you add up all the time given to all stories focused on L.A. government, business and economy; all crime-related stories of civic importance (e.g., rewards offered, public corruption, police shootings); all stories about people dealing with local issues like traffic and the environment; all local public health news; and all coverage of the L.A. wildfires and water main breaks (which occurred during the study's sample), all that news combined took up about 4 minutes of a composite a half-hour.

Update:

"I was worried before the study was released," said Commissioner Michael J. Copps. "Now I'm flat out alarmed."

The study shows that, in a typical half-hour news broadcast, hard stories about local government amount to less than a half a minute. "How's that for keeping people informed?" Copps asked.

"This is not picking on the good folks of L.A. I've been in all four corners of the country where this is unfortunately the case. This study should be incorporated into the work being done at the FCC on the Information Needs of Communities in a Digital Era. This is an evidential versus anecdotal perspective of local broadcast news and the results are most troubling. The digital divide continues to separate our lower income, less educated members of society from broadband media, and we simply cannot afford to turn a blind eye to the media that those Americans without broadband are receiving."

"I look forward to a comprehensive FCC report dealing with the information needs of our communities to be completed in late summer and proceed to action by year's end. There's no time to be wasted."

The study was commissioned by the Civic Alliance of Los Angeles over a concern that citizens were not receiving the information they needed to fulfill their obligation in terms of voting and participating in the public dialogue. "Unfortunately, it seems as if their fears have been confirmed," Copps said.

"People are still receiving much of their news over the airwaves as numerous recent studies have shown," said Commissioner Copps. "Anyone dubious or skeptical of these findings and how they relate to their own community should do one simple thing: Watch your news with a stopwatch and then ask if your needs are being met."