Obviously, legislators will listen to lobbyists instead of their constituents

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Then there were none - last political broadcaster
By Randy Shandobil, September 2, 2013

We're almost extinct: broadcast political reporters. Last week, ABC news, in a cost-cutting move, closed its Sacramento bureau and laid off two political reporters, Nannette Miranda and Mark Matthews. There are now no remaining broadcast reporters covering politics full time in the Bay Area.

Up until a few years ago, Northern California was flush with broadcast political reporters, some of them very good. But in 2010 one of the best, Hank Plante, retired from San Francisco's CBS affiliate. Shortly after that, the well-connected Kevin Riggs left Sacramento's NBC affiliate to join a political consulting firm and I left KTVU to start my own business. None of us has been replaced and now Miranda and Matthews will join us, watching from the sidelines.

TV news crews are now a rarity in the California Capitol, more rare than bipartisan legislation. One Sacramento station does still cover the governor and Legislature and many newspapers still have Sacramento bureaus, though the print bureaus are shrinking, too. When told of the latest layoffs Plante mused, "think of all the stories not being told."

Imagine the temptation to speed if there was no highway patrol. The word is out among politicians, consultants and lobbyists: the cat's away.

To be sure, television newsrooms do still cover government and politics, but they now do it with general assignment reporters. This is not to disparage general assignment reporters. Many are excellent. But if they're covering a murder on Monday, a missing child story on Tuesday, hot weather on Wednesday, and a fire on Thursday, it's not realistic to expect them to delve into the nuances of complicated legislation on Friday.

Though the money pool isn't as deep as it once was, most Bay Area television stations still swim in profits. So why don't stations still aggressively cover politics? Probably for a few reasons: Stories focusing on crime, traffic and disaster are visual and often quick and easy to cover. The meaning and importance of such stories is self-evident.

The significance of government and political stories is often not so obvious. Reporters sometimes have to connect the dots so that news consumers understand why they should care. Also, political stories are usually not visual: Talking heads and analysis are no match for car chases and flames on the stimulation meter. Yet another explanation for the vanishing breed: political reporters tend to be veterans. Replacing them with younger, less experienced reporters leads to cost savings.

No one should feel sorry for departed broadcast political journalists. For decades, we were well paid for doing what we loved and we had a front row seat to history. And while broadcast journalists often break important stories, print reporters complain that TV just as often takes information from the morning newspapers and then visualizes it. Guilty as charged.

Still, reading about politicians dancing around the truth isn't quite as impactful as seeing politicians do it. And while more people are going online for their news, surveys show the majority of Americans still prefer to be informed by broadcasters.

Good political journalism can motivate viewers to call their legislator and get involved in shaping legislation. But with less broadcast coverage of politics, will voters become even more apathetic? With almost no broadcast scrutiny, who will our legislators listen to: their constituents or lobbyists?
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