Beating up on broadcast television is like clubbing a baby seal. Sure, it's easy and fun, but is it morally right?

There is a running gun battle in Congress and elsewhere over the amount of public affairs and political information produced on broadcast news stations and telecast over our publicly owned airwaves.

Those on all sides of the argument have a new piece of grist to chew.

According to a study led by the Norman Lear Center and released on Feb. 15, broadcast television news coverage of local political races is extremely low – just 5 percent of all political coverage in 2004. TV stations, on average, spend more time on teasers to upcoming stories, flashy intros and catchy musical "bumpers" (totaling 1:43 in a typical half-hour newscast) than they do on stories about local campaigns (typically 30 seconds).

In Tampa Bay, the study found that coverage of local campaigns (defined as non-presidential campaigns such as for U.S. Senate, House or local offices such as the county commission) accounted for between 1 and 7 percent of the political coverage in 2004.

"Last summer, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain, FCC Chairman Michael Powell and FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein challenged America's broadcasters to live up to the promise in their licenses to provide significant coverage of local races," Lear Center Director Martin Kaplan said when the study was released. "It looks like that challenge pretty much fell on deaf ears."

While local campaign coverage is low, the number of advertisements being aired by those stations climbs. Nationally, local TV stations received $1.6 billion in revenues from political ads in 2004, the study found. That was just for federal races, including the presidency and the U.S. Senate. A search of Florida's online election finance database turns up $33-million more that was spent on "media" or "television advertising" in local races in Florida alone in 2004.

The implication is clear: TV stations are quick to take politicians' cash, but not so fast to answer the call to provide more free coverage.

How important are those revenues? Consider this March 2004 industry assessment from a Wall Street analyst for Legg Mason distributed under the title, "TV Broadcasters to Benefit from Political Good News": "We believe the political situation for TV broadcasters has improved over the last several months due to a number of factors: strong fundraising despite campaign finance reform, a tight presidential race, very strong presidential spending on broadcast TV ads, and new competitive Senate races."

Other findings in the study (which can be downloaded at www.localnewsarchive.org) include:

• TV stations spend 12 times as much of their newscasts talking about sports and weather than they do local campaigns.

• The average length of a candidate's sound bite when they do get airtime: 12 seconds.

• The average percentage of political stories that dealt with issues instead of who's ahead, or the "horse race": 33 percent.

• Attempts to do "Ad Watches," where the veracity of paid political advertising is checked, were only 1 percent of political coverage.

• 19 percent of political stories dealt with where to vote, how to vote early, voting irregularities or other mechanical polling issues.

"Local stations were fairly diligent about telling people where and how to vote," Kaplan said in a written release accompanying the study in February. "If only they'd done as well at telling people who was running and what the issues were."

That, according to one Tampa Bay news director, is an impossible order to fill.

"Local politics is not the province of our news station," said Forrest Carr, a 25-year news veteran who runs the newsroom at WFLA-Ch. 8. "We have a 10-county broadcast area. It's just not humanly possible" to cover the myriad local campaigns in that large an area. That, he added, is the job of daily and community newspapers.

Besides, Carr said, "A television news audience will not sit still for it."

The study, which Carr contends "has no connection with reality," found that WFLA devoted 7 percent of is political coverage to local campaigns. That was tops in Tampa Bay. ABC Action News (WFTS-Ch. 28) came in second with 6 percent; Fox 13 (WTVT) allotted 5 percent of its political coverage to local races; and our CBS affiliate, Tampa Bay's 10 (WTSP) came in last, with just 1 percent of its political stories dealing with local campaigns. News directors at WTVT, WFTS and WTSP did not respond to requests for comment on the study.

The study examined ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox affiliate newscasts in 11 media markets (including No. 14 Tampa Bay) in the four weeks leading up to Election Day 2004. Researchers categorized an average of 93 percent of those newscasts from 5 to 11:30 p.m. in October, when political campaigning was at its peak.

The good news for Tampa Bay is that we saw more stories about issues than we did about the horse race or strategy of a campaign. According to the study, we're the only media market in the survey that can say that. Two Tampa Bay stations, Ch. 8 and Ch. 10, devoted airtime to the U.S. Senate race, airing live debates. Other stations, including Ch. 28 and Ch. 8, provided free air time for local candidates, who could tape 3-5 minute spiels that ran unedited.

The study does have flaws, too. It looked at only a narrow range of air time, ignoring Sunday morning public affairs shows and other political coverage or free air time given outside of the 5-11:30 p.m. window. At least two TV stations nationally have complained about errors in the report or its methodology.

"I think local TV, especially in Tampa Bay, showed a good bit of dedication to coverage but the study did not reflect the depth of their coverage because it missed the midday and morning news," said Al Tompkins, a former news director and faculty member at the media think tank Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg. "Mornings are the fastest growing time slot."

"If you are counting commitment, then look at web coverage, too. WFLA and Bay News 9 can count extensive online coverage on their side," the Lear Center's Kaplan said in an e-mail exchange about this issue. (Kaplan counts several large television ownership groups as clients.)

Now for the politics. The report was immediately entered onto the docket of the Federal Communications Commission and touted at a news conference by McCain. The onetime and aspiring presidential contender opposes further media consolidation and is using this study as evidence of why too many stations in too few hands is bad.

Don't think for a minute that the broadcasters don't know it.

"The study has a political agenda, and I'm always leery of a study that has a political agenda," Carr said. "It is already being used as a club to beat us with.

"Politicians do not want to pay to be on the airways; they think they have a God-given right to be on the airwaves," continued Carr, who emphasized that he was not speaking on behalf of his station.

"These days, there is this belief that you cannot get elected to office without buying a gazillion dollars worth of television advertising. The answer is not to open up the airwaves to politicians, it is to limit the airwaves. You have this unfettered access to political advertising time, and the public is deluged by political advertising, some of which is abjectly and absolutely false."

And quite lucrative, from a corporate standpoint.

The Political Whore doesn't really think clubbing baby seals is easy or fun or morally correct. The morality of clubbing politicians is another matter all together. You can reach Political Whore at 813-832-6427 or by e-mail at wayne.garcia@weeklyplanet.com.

This article appears in Mar 9-15, 2005.