It's no wonder that citizens are uninformed about local elections. Considering this week's release of a study about local television news broadcasts by the NewsLab at UW-Madison, it is amazing that people even know there is an election Nov. 7.
The NewsLab study found that the local television news broadcasts in the Midwest devote on average 36 seconds of the 30-minute broadcast to election coverage.
This is deplorable considering that the study found that the average broadcast devotes over 10 minutes to commercials, seven minutes to sports and weather coverage and almost two minutes to teasers, bumpers and intros.
Furthermore, public opinion research shows that voters depend on local television news as their primary source of information about elections. How are people supposed to make informed votes if their primary source of information spends more time explaining how the Packers lost, yet again?
One could argue that television news is a business, but while broadcast news is a business, the TV station can only do business because they have free use of the public airwaves.
This free access gives them a responsibility to provide their viewer with a public service that is essential to democracy.
The study looked at the largest city and the state capital of five Midwestern states. Madison television stations spent more time every night on election coverage than the other states: a paltry 65 seconds.
But before we pat our local network TV stations on the back too much it is important to remember that they wouldn't touch the hour-long gubernatorial debate with a ten-foot pole. That was relegated to public television.
