Former Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neil was famously quoted as saying, “All politics is local.” While all news is not local, it is certainly true that all catastrophes are local. Whenever there is a major event or tragedy that strikes a local community, whether it be a mass shooting, a hurricane, or an earthquake, people in the affected city often turn to their local news station for updates and information.
Local news reporters live in and are intimately familiar with the community, and people in the community are familiar with them and generally see them as on their side. They are experiencing the same events at the same time, and there is an emotional connection. I remember in the days following 9/11, while much of the country was tuned into national news, I tended to watch my favorite local news channel for updates. They were more familiar with New York, I was more familiar with them, and we were all going through the same thing.
The COVID-19 pandemic is different from virtually every other tragedy or catastrophe in my lifetime. While it is a national and worldwide event, it is also occurring in every city and every local community across the country.
As more people are forced to stay home, more people are watching television, and more people are watching local news. Throughout much of March and early April, cable and local news have seen a spike in ratings, and not just among its regular older audience, but among younger folks as well (including kids and teens who are home from school as their parents tune to more local news to keep informed).
Local news viewership has risen most in regions of the country where the most COVID-19 cases have been reported. The West Coast was hit earlier than other regions, and according to Nielsen, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Seattle had the most significant increases in local news viewing. Then the New York metro area became the virus epicenter, and local news ratings climbed.
This might be bad news for President Trump and Republicans in general.
Ardent Trump supporters get much of their information about political and world events from Fox News or even more conservative outlets. It often seems as though the President and his staff also live in this conservative news bubble, and tend to be surprised when exposed to a broader viewpoint. They consider more liberal news entities, such as MSNBC and CNN, and much of the national broadcast network news to be fake. Ordinarily, local news does not get heavily involved in fact-checking President Trump or his administration. They often just report what he says and move on to other stories. Most viewers, including Trump supporters see their favorite local news team more as family (or at least part of their routine) and tend to trust them more than they do mainstream national news outlets. Numerous studies and surveys bear this out.
People are home and are heavily tuning in to their local news to see daily updates from their governors and mayors on how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting their communities. What they are hearing often conflicts with the national press conferences given by the President. At the same time, viewers (including Trump supporters) are seeing their local emergency room doctors and nurses in dire situations begging the administration for more supplies and protective gear (as the administration is saying they don’t really need that much and look what a good job we are doing).
While initial virus epicenters have been primarily in blue states (NY, Cal), red and purple states are starting to get hit hard (Louisiana, Michigan, Colorado, Texas, Florida…). Even most Republican governors, who can no longer ignore what all their constituents can see with their own eyes, are walking a fine line between disagreeing and criticizing the Trump administration. But the effect is the same – don’t believe what you hear from the administration, here’s the truth. This dichotomy is certainly having an effect on potential Trump voters – and could soon start to impact even his strongest fans.
You can only convince your true believers that a pandemic is a hoax until it strikes their community and affects them or someone they know. During this type of crisis, people turn to more than just their go-to source of political agreement echo chamber (whether conservative or liberal) for information. To be sure, there are many people who see Fox News as a purveyor of the real truth, an important counterbalance to what they have long believed to be liberal bias among traditional media outlets. So, when Fox primetime hosts, such as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram, imply or claim outright that the coronavirus is a hoax, they believe them. When a loyal Fox News viewer or one of their family members follows their lead and doesn’t take the pandemic seriously, what happens when they or someone they love actually gets the virus, and then hears Fox News hosts claim they never said it was a hoax in the first place? Will their trust in Fox News and President Trump start to fade? This remains to be seen, but I suspect the answer is yes at least for a chunk of them.
This could also impact some Republican Governors, who delayed (or still refuse) implementing social distancing or stay-at-home policies for no other reason than to avoid annoying Donald Trump. This type of sycophantic behavior might serve them well under normal circumstances, when a Trump tweet could make or break their political career. But not when it negatively affects the health and safety of their constituents. It will be hard for them to get away with denying they did this come election time.
Princeton University psychologist and public opinion researcher, Hadley Cantril, many years ago developed several “laws of public opinion.” Here’s one that has always stuck with me. “Events of unusual magnitude are likely to swing public opinion from one extreme to another. Opinion does not become stabilized until the implications of events are seen with some perspective.” A good example of this is the Iraq war. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, people across the country wanted a strong U.S. response, and were more likely to believe whatever “evidence” the government provided to support invading Iraq. Several years later, with the perspective of time, most of those same people saw the invasion as a mistake.
There is also something known as the “rally around the flag effect.” In times of crisis, Presidential approval ratings tend to be elevated, regardless of how low they were before the crisis or their political party. Some examples – George W. Bush had an all-time high approval rating of 90% after 9/11, Harry Truman’s approval ratings rose to 87% at the end of WWII, George H.W. Bush had an approval rating of 86% during the first Gulf War, FDR’s was 83% after Pearl Harbor, Barack Obama’s approval rating was at his highest (in the 60s) during the financial crisis in 2009, and even Jimmy Carter had his approval rating jump from a dismal 29% to 58% at the start of the Iran hostage crisis. President Trump’s approval rose from 44% to 49% from the beginning to the end of March.
So, while President Trump, his surrogates, and his media allies are touting the fact that his approval ratings are at an all-time high, it remains startlingly low at under 50% during a time of national crisis that is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. This should be reason for panic rather than celebration.
The longer this pandemic lasts, and the more television markets that continue to see local news viewership surge, the greater the challenge will be for President Trump to maintain his defense against the public perception that his administration did not act fast enough and is not doing enough to help the people now.
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