Government Eyewitness: Considering New Approaches to Political Coverage Through Local TV’s Greatest Strengths

In this monograph, we assess audience reactions to local TV news political coverage across an array of topics and research designs. First, we trace the development in local TV news of the now universally recognized reporter-driven emphasis: the local Eyewitness News model. That format’s role in establishing reporters as local elites is our basis for comparing how audiences respond to local reporters associated with the “eyewitness” brand versus reporters from national broadcast outlets. Using a combination of survey and field experiments, we investigate how audiences respond to eyewitness reporters. First, we vary audience exposure to partisan and policy frames sourced to these reporters. Across these experiments, audiences, and especially Republicans, respond more favorably to local than to national reporters and to the use of a policy than a partisan frame. Our second set of experiments test false balance and truth-telling in local TV stories about the 2020 presidential election. Again, the local reporter bests a national counterpart in terms of audience, especially Republican, reactions. In our third set of studies, we examine different combinations of human-interest content in the traditional thematic and episodic framing approaches in TV news for their effect on audiences’ climate change attitudes. We conclude by showing how these results inform an expansion of the topics and approaches local TV news affiliates should take to offer political coverage of value.