Local TV News Archives as a Public Good

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 01 Sep 2000 21:56:00 -0400

It is well established that political information shares the characteristics of a public good (Downs 1957; Popkin 1991). People won’t acquire the socially optimal amount of political information because they can’t reap the full benefit of their investment. Recognizing that a well-informed populace is essential to a healthy democracy, the government grants major media substantial public subsidies and special legal protections (Cook 1998). In return, the media take on the costs of monitoring the government that individual members of the public are unwilling and unable to bear.

Analogously, a role of the political communication scholar is to keep the media accountable to the public. But just as the media have great difficulty keeping the government accountable without accessible and affordable government records, political communication scholars have the same difficulty in regard to the media without accessible and affordable media records.

Both government archives (e.g., the National Archives) and news archives are forms of political information vital to keeping democratic intermediaries -- whether public officials or the press -- accountable to the public. As such, they are both public goods: The marketplace, left purely to its own devices, will not supply the public with optimal access to these types of archives.

Although other mass media news archives, such as daily newspaper archives, have serious flaws (Snider and Janda 1998), local TV news archives remain the most serious problem. Local TV news has become a vital democratic intermediary -- and, for many Americans, a primary source of political information -- but its archives are, for practical purposes, inaccessible to scholars. By far the least expensive record of local news to archive is the closed-captioned feed that accompanies TV programs. Closed captioning is a synchronized transcript of news, usually appearing on the bottom of the screen. The failure to archive closed captions of local news, despite the trivial cost of doing so and the great value of an easily searchable news database, vividly illustrates the need to update public policy toward news archives.

To access the full article, see the PDF document linked below.

Digital Future of Public Media: Latest Articles

Local TV News Archives as a Public Good