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The Harvard International Journal of Press Politics 5.2 (2000) 111-117



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Local TV News Archives as a Public Good

James H. Snider


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.

Thanks to the lobbying of the hearing-impaired community, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 mandated closed captioning on most programming in the United States. As implemented by the Federal Communications Commission on August 7, 1997, with major revisions on September 17, 1998, all TV stations must have 100 percent of their new, nonexempt programming, including news programs, closed-captioned by January 1, 2006. This requirement is to be phased in, with key intermediary benchmarks on January 1 of the years 2000, 2002, and 2004. [End Page 111]

Even before the Telecommunications Act was implemented, closed captioning was widespread. According to a 1996 National Association of Broadcasters study (Fratrik 1996), 57.1 percent of local TV stations regularly provided closed-captioned local news programming. These stations provided 22.3 hours of local news per week, of which 19.5 hours (87.4 percent of the total news hours) were closed-captioned.Over two-thirds (67.1 percent) of the stations providing closed captions in their local news had a sponsor for this service.

The closed-captioning provisions of the Telecommunications Act suggest that an economic feasibility analysis of local TV news archives can ignore the costs of transcription, digitalization, and synchronization. These are sunk costs that local TV stations must pay whether or not they provide archives.

Nor are there any marginal costs that should inhibit the production of local TV news archives. The most frequently mentioned contender is storage cost, but contemporary computing power trivializes these costs. A typical commercial TV station generates approximately four hours of local news daily. Even at several hundred words per minute, this requires less than 200 megabytes of storage capacity per year. Removable storage media now sell for well under 1 cent per megabyte. Thus, the storage cost to record local TV transcripts digitally is under $1 a year per station. Multiplying that number by the roughly 1,000 commercial TV stations in the United States gives...

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