Underrepresented

In chapter seven of "Mass Media and American Politics" by Doris A. Graber and Johanna Dunaway there is an in depth examination of the crisis that is the current state of traditional news reporting in America today. While national news is still covered in adequate frequency and scope, state and local level news has seen a significant downscaling. To some extent even local news gets more representation by local news media than state level political news. State level political news is scarcely covered recently beyond the major political scandals and changing of the guard news. If a person wants to read about current political news at the state level they are actually required to seek it out from news media outlets centrally local in state capitals and the surrounding areas.

The reasons for this are mainly monetary, many news media organization are unwilling to spend the money needed to cover state level politics beyond major stories known of in advance. However, the motive for allocating funding away from state level politics is not based solely in greed. It is rooted in the fact that traditional in print news media has been in constant decline in circulation over the past decade. As many Americans turn to the internet for their news these days, many in print news publications are suffering from underfunding as a result of poor circulation. While it is true that these news organizations receive significantly more revenue from advertising then they do from sales of the publication itself. Many companies are rethinking where to spend their advertising dollars, if more Americans are reading news on the internet then that is where more eyes will see their advertising.

With the significantly decreased budgets that news organizations find themselves working within, there are some hard choices that must be made. Reporting personal is usually decreased first, sending many reporters with less experience and name recognition packing. Many of these less experienced reporters would be assigned to less noteworthy state level politics causing underrepresentation of this material.  Also, with their less robust financing and reporting personal many larger news organizations concentrate their efforts on national news deciding not the spend money reporting at the state level. Whatever the reasoning beyond the lack of state political coverage, it is a bane on the democratic process that is not going to get better overtime.