Local TV News Tops Cable for Voters

A TVB analysis of Nielsen Media Research data from last spring suggests that local early and late news audiences in the top 10 US markets are a closer match for "American Voters" than are the audiences for any of the major cable news networks.  As such, they suggest that advertising on local TV news may be a better deal for political advertisers.

It’s long been established that television remains the most effective and influential medium for political campaigns to reach voters and hard data shows that local broadcast news viewership is far more in line with today’s voting population than the national cable news networks,” said Steve Lanzano, TVB president.

I'm not really surprised by the argument - local news audiences tend to reflect, more or less, market demographics, while the cable news channels target different audiences.  Fox, CNBC and MSNBC are fairly honest about it, but CNN tilts older and a bit liberal as well.  Besides, the demographic mix of actual voters has fluctuated in the last two major election cycles (and I suspect further shifts in 2012) - so it's a bit like trying to match a moving target.
  Then again, a lot of political advertising is targeted, and for those ad buys it may be better to find an outlet that matches up with the target population rather than going for a broad reach.  Placing local ads on highly targeted cable nets (news or other) is one of the better advertising buys for highly targeted campaigns.

Local TV news will get a lot of needed revenues from political advertising revenue this year, in either case.

Source -  Local TV News Tops Cable In Reaching Voters,  TVNewsCheck
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