The Princeton Packet
Back in the day when Benjamin Franklin described New Jersey as “a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit,” he had no inkling of how perfectly that description would one day apply to media coverage of the Garden State.
Not the print media, mind you. Newspapers were already abundant in the 18th century and still cover New Jersey pretty thoroughly today, with 19 dailies and more than 160 weeklies keeping a watchful eye on the issues and events shaping our state. The electronic media, however, didn’t exist back in Colonial times. Today, they are dominant — and their attention rarely extends beyond the boundaries of those two “mountains of conceit.”
The lack of television coverage of New Jersey has been lamented almost from the moment the TV was invented (ironically, in New Jersey) back in the 1940s. Network affiliates were anchored in New York and Philadelphia, soon joined by a handful of independent stations, none of which paid the remotest attention to news happening across the Hudson or the Delaware.
Public television stepped in to fill the void, with Channel 13 setting up shop in Newark and New Jersey Network establishing UHF channels that theoretically reached every household in the state. But few people watched these channels, and the absence of a commercial station became a major irritant to people concerned about New Jerseyans’ relative lack of knowledge about the goings-on in their state.
Enter Bill Bradley. In 1982, the then-U.S. senator sponsored a bill that compelled any commercial television licensee convicted of violating federal election laws to move to a state that did not have a commercial VHF station. The only licensee to which this law applied was WOR-TV, Channel 9 in New York. (The corporate owner, General Tire and Rubber Co., had made illegal contributions to the Nixon campaign.) The only state to which the new law applied was New Jersey.And so it came to pass that Channel 9 became WWOR-TV, and moved to Secaucus. In the 25 years since then, according to a grassroots coalition of New Jersey citizens challenging the station’s license renewal, it has paid little more than lip service to its adopted state.
The challengers, who call themselves Voice for New Jersey, cite WWOR-TV’s own data, which show that from 1999 to 2006, the station broadcast an average of 170 news stories about New Jersey per year — or less than one story every two days. In 2006, public affairs programming devoted to the Garden State averaged less than 90 minutes a month. In 2005, the station ran a total of nine news stories on the New Jersey governor’s race — seven of them in the final week of the campaign.
The Federal Communications Commission, the agency responsible for issuing and renewing broadcast licenses, offered the following guidance when it approved WWOR-TV’s move to New Jersey: “We expect (WWOR-TV) to perform a higher degree of service to its Grade B coverage area (Northern New Jersey) than is normally required of a broadcast licensee. At renewal time, (WWOR-TV) will be judged by how it has met the obligation to serve the greater service needs of Northern New Jersey, which we view as broader than the specific needs of Secaucus.”
It’s now renewal time — and Voice for New Jersey thinks it’s pretty clear that WWOR-TV has failed to meet the FCC’s expectations, let alone the needs and interests of New Jersey viewers. We agree. We wish the group well in its quest to bring meaningful commercial television coverage to our state.
