Commentary
Loss Of Newspapers Leads To Waning Interest In Local Politics
- by September 28, 2021
To measure the relationship between local news and political involvement, researchers led by Michael Sinkinson, an assistant professor of economics at Yale School of Management, studied a period when broadcast television expanded throughout the United States after World War II.
The Federal Communications Commission in 1948 suspended the licensing of new TV stations to resolve technical challenges. The four-year period known as the
“FCC freeze” offered a way to compare how the advent of television affected local newspapers and voting patterns in different communities, Yale Insights reported.
advertisement
advertisement
The researchers gathered data on
newspaper circulation, number of printed pages, types of content, advertising costs and the number of print ads sold yearly. They found that people began to stop reading newspapers – especially
evening editions -- as they watched TV instead. National advertisers shifted their media spending from print publications to TV to reach these growing audiences.
The newspaper
industry continued to expand its audience during the advent of TV, but more slowly. TV’s higher growth rate lured away more advertising dollars, leaving newspapers with less money for coverage
of local topics.
The effects on political outcomes were seen in voting patterns. Sinkinson and his team studied split-ticket voting, or when a person votes for different
political parties at the national and local levels. This kind of voting is an indication that people are focusing on specific candidates rather than parties.
The markets with
TV stations showed a lower portion of split-ticket votes, perhaps indicating that people had done less research on local elections by reading a newspaper that provided more comprehensive
coverage.
The advent of the internet and social media has hastened the demise of many local newspapers, which is worrisome considering that digital media are also rife with
misinformation, conspiracy theories and politically divisive sock-puppet campaigns. Silkinson’s study adds to the growing body of research about the consequences of newspaper closures, including the rising cost of public corruption.
Amid concerns about dying newspapers, several lawmakers last summer reintroduced the Local Journalism Sustainability Act to provide tax credits to local newspapers, subscribers and advertisers for several years.
The proposal looks workable as a market-based solution that would give readers more choice in supporting local news.
2 comments about "Loss Of Newspapers Leads To Waning Interest In Local Politics".
Read more comments >
Next story loading 
Rob, in the early - mid- 1950s, a typical network affiliated TV station presented a nightly early newscast starring a boring news reader lasting about 15 minutes, adjacent to its equally short---and boring--- network counterpart, plus a very brief and cursorylate news report---often only 10-15 minutes in duration. In some of the larger markets some independent stations featured 30-60 minute early evening newscasts after their kid show blocks ended and that was about it. What really killed newspapers---aside from destructive workers' strikes---- was the huge expansion of TV news coverage, with the national nightly news morphing to 30-minutes and the local versions often sandwiching the national reports with 30-minute installments before and after. Also, TV news producers made their shows faster paced and visually engaging as they vied with eachother for ratings. The same thing happened to the late news as just about every staion featured 30-minute entries. As this type of fare drew financial services, car dealers, local utilities, travel and many other types of advertisers who were previously big newspapaer users, the die was cast---against newspapers--and the advent of 24/7 cable news plus the shift to one -hour news formats by local stations at noon,in the early evenings and at 10PM for indies completed the process. Finally it was the internets's turn with instant news available any time needed.
My point is that newspapers didn't die because people devoted 3 hours a day to TV --- mostly to entertainment shows---and later upped this to 4-5 hours a day. Newspapers died because TV and then, the internet, provided news---enough of it to satisfy and as fast or faster than newspapers while at the same time, audiences became less interested in detailed reporting and preferred easier to digest fare.
Ed,
Thanks for the detailed commentary!
Rob