ABSTRACT

So, how do local media cover Congress and its members? You might reasonably ask, “Who cares?” In 1992, I discovered that suddenly I cared. While working on a research paper for a media and politics course in graduate school, I found myself confronted by a contradiction between what scholars said about how local media covered members of Congress and my own observations of the local news. The scholarly research claimed that members of Congress enjoyed frequent and mostly favorable coverage from their local press.4