Local Television News in a Changing Media Environment

The rapid decline in the number of US news outlets, especially at the local level, has alarmed scholars because democratic societies depend on the media to provide citizens with information. Recent social science research suggests local television news helps with this information provision task; however, this argument is at odds with research on the quality of local television newscasts spanning decades, which concludes that they offer sensationalism, not substance. In this dissertation, I consider the production and consumption of local television news. Drawing on prior literature, I develop an argument that local TV news’s potential for impact on Americans’ political knowledge and attitudes depends on the intersection of content and viewers. Specifically, the most likely pathway for local TV news to influence what Americans think and know about politics is by delivering modest amounts of hard news content to news-avoidant viewers. In Chapter 2, I analyze ten years of local TV news transcripts using a novel natural language processing pipeline. I document the presence of a steady drumbeat of coverage of both local and national politics and government. In Chapter 3, using a large-scale panel data set of TV viewing, I show that local TV news is more effective at reaching news-avoidant Americans than broadcast or cable TV news. Together, these two empirical chapters present evidence of a pathway for local TV news to have an informative influence. In recent years, scholars have also raised concerns about the potential for local TV news to serve as a vector for partisan actors to influence public opinion. Whether local TV news is a useful platform for partisan persuasion depends on how viewers respond to biased news content in their local newscasts. In Chapter 4, by integrating news transcripts with viewership data, I demonstrate that local TV news viewers do not tune out when a newscast gets political and, thus, may be a prime audience for persuasion.

Author dc:creator

• Wolken, Samuel

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Hopkins, Daniel, J.
• Lelkes, Yphtach

• Political Science

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/62347

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.upenn.edu:20.500.14332/62347