IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/bjposi/v54y2024i2p503-513_14.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

House Members on the News: Local Television News Coverage of Incumbents

Author

Listed:
  • Huber, Gregory A.
  • Tucker, Patrick D.

Abstract

The accountability relationship between voters and elected members of Congress (MCs) hinges on the potential for citizens to learn about legislator behaviour. In an era of declining local newspapers, local television coverage of MCs potentially fulfils this important role. However, few studies have comprehensively examined the determinants of contemporary MC coverage by local television news broadcasts. In this paper, we leverage a vast database of local television news broadcast transcripts spanning two years to identify which factors explain MC coverage. We find that MCs receive little coverage outside the general election campaign season. Media market and campaign-specific factors are associated with more exposure when coverage occurs. Finally, we find that within competitive elections, incumbents receive only a marginal advantage in coverage. These findings provide a springboard to explore further questions regarding Congress, local media, and political accountability.

Suggested Citation

  • Huber, Gregory A. & Tucker, Patrick D., 2024. "House Members on the News: Local Television News Coverage of Incumbents," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 54(2), pages 503-513, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:bjposi:v:54:y:2024:i:2:p:503-513_14
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0007123423000480/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gregory J. Martin & Nicola Mastrorocco & Joshua McCrain & Arianna Ornaghi, 2024. "Media Consolidation," CESifo Working Paper Series 11356, CESifo.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:bjposi:v:54:y:2024:i:2:p:503-513_14. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jps .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.