The profoundly discouraging numbers come from an ambitious study released early Thursday called Philly Political Media Watch, a joint venture of four organizations. They include the San Francisco-based Internet Archive; the Washington, D.C.-based Sunlight Foundation; the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based civic group; and the Center for Community Research & Service in the School of Public Policy & Administration at the University of Delaware.
Candidates
and other outfits such as PACs spent a whopping $14.4 million to buy
12,000 commercials on six Philly stations in those two months. That sum
is even more impressive in that the region, which includes parts of
Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, didn't have a whole lot of
competitive races. Some 8,000 of those ads aired during newscasts.
"There's
no way for a citizen to make his way through the bombardment and
onslaught (of political ads) and make an informed decision," says the
study's author, Danilo Yanich, a professor at the University of
Delaware.
Political Ads & Local TV News by Danilo Yanich
That's particularly true when the stations do so little enterprise
work analyzing the candidates' positions and the content of those
lucrative commercials.
Television stations have been major
beneficiaries of the wild-spending days of the Citizens United era. All
the more reason for them to dedicate airtime and resources to helping
their audiences cut through the clutter.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson,
director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of
Pennsylvania, finds the performance of the television stations
"pathetic." She says the combination of so much advertising on newscasts
and so little analysis is a double whammy for the electorate.
Having
the ads juxtaposed with the news gives them a "halo effect," she says
being in close proximity to news gives the propaganda heightened
credibility and causes confusion.
"People divorce the source and
the message, and remember (the ads) as news," she says. That's even more
the case when the ads aren't "contextualized" with real reporting.