Context for the moment
The midterms are already here, and so are the old temptations. Primaries reward speed, conflict, and the tidy little drama of who is up, who is down, who is surging, who is fading. Local television will face that pressure all year.
That is why this paper matters now. Johnson and Cohn describe local journalism as “at a crossroads,” warning that when local stations try to replicate “polling data, pundit chatter, and strategic speculation,” they risk giving up “contextual depth, community relevance, and interpretive humility.”
Why it matters
Horse-race coverage trains audiences to read elections as spectacles rather than as shared public consequences.
Local television still holds one advantage national outlets do not: it can make democratic stakes feel lived, not abstract.
The core insight
The paper finds that local Sunday political shows in five states relied on two dominant frames during the final 100 days of the 2024 election: horse-race coverage and local relevance. That pairing matters. One frame treats politics as competition, momentum, and viability; the other, with uneven success, tries to root national politics in local consequences and civic life. That tension is the whole story.
What the research shows
Across 15 Sunday morning political programs in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio, the dominant frame was horse-race coverage. As the paper puts it, local shows “consistently employed two key frames,” but “the dominant lens for covering the 2024 presidential election was the horse-race frame.” Anchors and panelists repeatedly organized the race around competition, polling, and punditry.
The authors found that horse-race framing “organized political news around competition, momentum, and viability.”
Even when polling appeared, it “frequently lacked context,” which made numbers do more narrative work than explanatory work.
The paper argues that local stations risk “forfeiting their comparative advantage” when they mimic national coverage habits instead of leaning into explanation and community relevance.
The local frame, though, is where the paper gets more interesting. In Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, local relevance more often meant democracy, voting rights, election integrity, election logistics, and the use of election officials or community voices to explain what voters actually needed to know. In Minnesota and Ohio, local relevance leaned more often on the vice-presidential candidates and symbolic home-state ties.
That is not a small distinction. One version of “local” builds civic understanding. The other mostly changes the camera angle.
What this research makes easier to see
The paper clarifies three things.
Local television is not immune to the same spectacle logics that have narrowed national election coverage. The horse-race frame remained resilient even in a medium that still claims civic proximity.
Local relevance is not automatically substantive. In some places, it meant deeper reporting on election administration and participation; in others, it meant little more than home-state symbolism.
Exclusion matters as much as inclusion. The paper notes that key communities, including Michigan’s Arab-American population, were sometimes referenced without being meaningfully included in the discussion.
That last point matters more than it first appears. Journalism does not only frame politics by what it says. It frames politics by who gets to count as part of the public conversation.
The newsroom connection
This is not just a study about election coverage. It is a study about recurring newsroom choices.
Do we lead with the poll?
Do we frame the economy as policy or as candidate advantage?
Do we book the pundit, or the election official, or the local expert who can tell viewers what the process actually requires of them?
Those choices accumulate.
The paper offers a line newsrooms should take seriously: local newscasts can serve as “resources for civic participation,” especially when they explain voting procedures, deadlines, misinformation, and ballot handling in plain language.
Thinking work
The hard question here is not whether horse-race framing is bad. Most journalists already know it can thin out coverage and inflate cynicism.
The harder question is why it remains so easy to produce.
Polls give a segment instant spine.
Punditry gives it movement.
Strategy talk creates conflict without requiring much explanatory labor.
By contrast, civic explanation takes time. It requires sourcing, translation, and a little faith that viewers can handle substance.
How journalists already use this
Many local journalists already know how to do the work this paper points toward.
They bring in county clerks. They explain absentee rules. They walk viewers through ID requirements, deadlines, and ballot counting. They push back, even briefly, when a pundit overreaches. One of the paper’s best small moments comes when a Michigan anchor interrupts a speculative turnout claim with a simple question: “Where are you seeing that?”
That instinct matters.
So does the paper’s longer Ohio example, where an elections official explains that “everything done by the board of elections is done in a bipartisan way,” offering viewers something national political coverage often does not: procedural reassurance without theater.
How journalists can use this research
This paper does not require a wholesale reinvention of local political TV. It asks for better habits.
Use polls with context or use them less. Numbers without historical or methodological framing invite drama, not understanding.
Define “local” more rigorously. A candidate’s home state is not the same thing as a community’s lived political concerns.
Build more voter-process reporting into the rundown. Election administration, misinformation, deadlines, and procedural trust are not sidebars; they are public-service journalism.
Look harder at who is missing. A local frame that leaves out key constituencies still narrows public understanding.
Bottom line
Local television still knows how to make elections matter. This paper shows that clearly. But it also shows how often local programs fall back on the same horse-race habits that have already made national election coverage thinner, louder, and less useful.
The race will always be there. The public needs the rest.
To access the research article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00936502251393580
— PRJ
Thinking, Elsewhere
I know this is one month back, but I’m still thinking about Kaitlin Collins’ podcast interview with Heather McMahon. In it, Collins opens up about her career, her thinking, and more. A special highlight is that it is the first interview after Trump told Collins to smile more; it is an interesting moment of thinking out loud as she processes it.
The war/conflict in the Middle East means lots of political information, polarized language, and mis- and disinformation. The News Literacy Project is a great place to help think about that thinking and encourage others to learn more as well. Check out their recent RumorGuard about the Iran War and AI-generated soldiers. They do great work explaining the process of dispelling rumors; it would be a great practice to emulate in newsrooms.