How Do Californians Get Their News About the State?

Chances are, if you are reading one daily paper, with the exception of the Sacramento Bee and a handful of papers, you will only get one article at best that deals with the important issues being dealt with by our government in the state capital. Many of those are the same ones that have appeared in other newspapers or are taken from the Associated Press or other wire services. They may be fine news articles or opinion pieces, but the variety and numbers of sources is diminishing in newspapers.

In many papers today or over the weekend, if you perused their California sections, you would see many more articles about Paris Hilton than any other state "news" or "issues." Apparently this is what the readers of the Times are paying the most attention to. Take a look at the 445 pages of over 4,500 comments on one article as readers shared their thoughts on Paris Hilton's jail sentence!

This morning, the LA Times launched its new "blog"--"Top of the Ticket"--which will primarily focus on national politics with a telling headline, "Paris Hilton Not Here." The Times is a great newspaper and still has the second largest number of reporters in the United States, only behind that of the New York Times. Yet looking for articles using a search tool on their site, with these names in quotation marks, here are the results I obtained since the start of this month, after Robert Salladay stopped working for them and they suspended publishing the blog, "Political Muscle":

Paris Hilton, 20
Fabian Nunez 8
Don Perata 6
Sheila Kuehl 5

Hilton handily beat out the Speaker of the California Assembly and the leader of the California State Senate, both of whom, along with Senator Sheila Kuehl, had major health bills pass in one or the other house of the legislature and all of whom also had a number of other high profile bills debated during this time. And this is not a new phenomenon --you can try your own searches. Since the start of the year, Hilton had 129 articles retrieved through this process to 114 for Nunez, author of the landmark global warming law passed last year. Perata at 70 times, and Kuehl at 26, were well behind in this little survey.

So it should be no surprise that the knowledge of state issues are as bad as they are in the recent Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) poll of California voters. Wiegand lists a few choice factoids in his column:

• Only three in 10 could name the largest single area of state government spending, or the largest source of revenues.

• Only one in 100 could correctly identify the maximum number of years a legislator can stay in office under current term limits.

• And only one in three knows at least something about how state bonds are repaid, which didn't keep two in three from favoring another $43.3 billion bond package for next year's ballot.

It is fitting that the PPIC entitled their release, "California Voters: What They Don’t Know Could Hurt Us?"

I am somewhat relieved to learn that the Times is in the process of hiring someone to write the Political Muscle blog, and although Salladay can't "be replaced" is searching for that particular person with knowledge of the policy and peccadilloes of the Sacramento scene.

Another must read article appeared in Grade the News in February. It was authored by Phil Trounstine the head of the San Jose State University Survey and Research Center. It is entitled: "The Crisis of Consolidation in Bay Area News Media: 'This is the situation one expects in a totalitarian regime, not in pluralistic America'. It begins:

The core counties of the San Francisco Bay Area -- Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara and the contiguous portion of Solano County – have a population of about six million people. In addition to their seven county governments, they include scores of cities, towns, sheriff’s and police departments; school boards, planning commissions, municipal and superior courts; universities and community colleges; water, solid waste and air boards; transportation commissions and public utility, weed-abatement and mosquito control boards, and many more government bodies.

In this region, one newspaper company -- MediaNews -- owns or controls every paid-subscription daily newspaper except for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Unfortunately what Trounstine has noted in his article is happening around the state. You can follow much of this on the Grade the News site.

With much of the Sacramento Bee's reporting behind a pay wall and therefore not seen by most Californians, the layoffs of a quarter of the Chronicle's staff, cuts at the Times, and consolidation, unless the internet media (blogs and otherwise) can step in to fill the void, we are headed for trouble.

There used to be full news bureaus from all around the state covering Sacramento. They declined in the 80's and 90's, only to be revived with a popular action hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger. When he departs, we may see even more attrition--an atrophying of the "political muscle" except for the few powerful organizations and figures in the state.

What we don't know will hurt us. For an upbeat and optimistic view of how this will all shake out, read Dan Gillmor's excellent article "Journalism Isn't Dying, It's Reviving" in last Thursday's San Francisco Chronicle.

Oh, and thank God for Public Radio and John Meyer's "The California Report".