Philly TV News: Lots of Campaign Ads, But No Coverage

The Sunlight Foundation recently watched a half-hour of the CBS 3 local news and found a wide disparity between the number of political commercials and the amount of time covering local political news. Specifically, during that half hour of Eyewitness News, there were 11 political commercials — and zero political stories.

“Instead of an all-news channel for news junkies, a channel for ad junkies!” Penn’s Kathleen Hall Jameson told the Foundation.

Using Federal Communications Commission data made available for analysis by Political Ad Sleuth, we are already able to quantify the biggest winners of campaign 2014: Local TV stations that are now struggling to find enough air time to accommodate the candidates and outside interest groups. The 30-second spots that aired on KYW’s evening newscast on Oct. 16 cost between $700 and $765 apiece and were part of larger ad buys that netted the station a total of more than $517,000.

Research for the project was done by the Philly Political Media Watch. The station reportedly did not respond to the Sunlight Foundation’s request for comment.

[via Mediabistro]