Local TV newscasts are now the public's number one source of news, according to a recent survey by Louis Harris for The Center for Media and Public Affairs. Not only do they get the biggest ratings, but people also rank them higher in quality and credibility than network news, local newspapers, or any other news source. That's scary.

Last April, Oregonian columnist Pete Schulberg spent five days surveying the local newscasts on Portland's five stations. He reported, "the focus, as always, is on crime . . . Stories about animals often dwarf matters of social and economic significance." "Missing in action" was any "news about the Oregon legislature, the Portland City Council, or the Multnomah County Commission." "If you want to hear about the national political scene," Schulberg concluded, "catch Leno's monologue or David Letterman's 'Top 10 List' - because you won't find it on your favorite station's late news."

Schulberg's findings in Portland uncannily match the local picture in the rest of the country. A study of 100 local TV newscasts in 56 cities by the Rocky Mountain Media Watch found that crime occupied 30 percent of what little time was actually devoted to the news (40 percent). Commercials and promos consumed an almost equal amount of time (36 percent). Sports and weather filled 22 percent; anchor chatter, 2 percent.

What makes local TV news so awful everywhere? Conventional wisdom blames 1) broadcaster greed - local TV newscasts are relatively cheap to produce and a major profit center for stations; 2) consultants, who've made the "Eyewitness" and "Happy Talk" news formula the standard; and 3) deregulation, which has eliminated pressure on broadcasters to serve their communities' needs and interests. But there's an even more basic reason.

The typical TV station spans too much territory to be truly local, covering more than 10,000 square miles, overlapping cities, counties, towns, wards, election districts, boroughs, and even states. For example, the NBC affiliate in Paducah, Kentucky, also serves Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Harrisburg/Mt. Vernon, Illinois, and western Tennessee. The CBS affiliate in Johnson City, Tennessee, covers not only Kingsport, Bristol, and the rest of northeast Tennessee but also southwest Virginia and western North Carolina. New York City's stations reach deep into Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. As former NBC programmer and researcher Paul Klein wrote with only a touch of hyperbole more than twenty years ago, "There no longer is a New Jersey, New York, or Connecticut - only a series of roughly circular areas, each with transmission towers at the center. In the electronic age it is the TV signal . . . more than arbitrary lines on a map, that give both economic and political coherence to an area."

Political lines were drawn long before electronic signals made geographical boundaries obsolete. In the age of zappers, the TV station that tries to cover a single community's civic, school board, or religious news risks losing most of its audience who live elsewhere. So local TV news concentrates on what will keep its entire coverage area tuned in - crime, scandal, heartwarming features, and local sports and weather. With a newspaper, you can decide to skip a story you have no interest in reading. The TV viewer in Kingsport, on the other hand, is likely to zap the channel rather than sit through a news item about a school board meeting in Johnson City, which means not only turning it off, but worse, turning on the competition.

Marty Haag, senior news vice president for the A. H. Belo stations (a TV group whose focus on local reporting is the exception that proves the rule), confirmed that "covering crime is the easiest, fastest, cheapest, most efficient kind of news coverage for TV stations. News directors and station owners love crime," he said, "because it has a one-to-one ratio between making the assignment and getting a story on-air." The crime scene, marked off in yellow police tape, doesn't move; no matter when the reporter arrives there's always a picture to shoot, preferably live. No need to spend off-camera time digging, researching, or even thinking. Just get to the crime scene, get the wind blowing through your hair, and the rest will take care of itself.

Will the wretched TV news picture change in the telecommunications era? Stations still don't know what they'll actually do with the new digital spectrum they've recently been given to bring viewers movie-quality, high-definition pictures and sound, which will improve the stations' look but not their content. Some stations may decide, instead, to use their new digital frequencies to turn their one channel into four or five channels, which will serve only to clone their bad news habits. A sign of hope, though, is blooming in cable, whose franchises do coincide with the boundary lines of individual towns, cities, and communities so that a cable channel can zone into individual homes with truly effective local news reports. Some cable operators are already exploring it - NY 1 in New York City, NewsChannel 8 in Washington, D.C., others on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in Orange County, California, and elsewhere.

In the future, the Internet may help to serve community needs and interests by enabling community leaders to talk on-line directly to their own constituents and empowering their constituents to talk back. But the last best hope for effective, old-fashioned local reporting remains newspapers that see strong local coverage as their best chance to add readers and suburban weeklies that make hometown news their exclusive beat.

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