School sports receive the most education-related media coverage, according to a new report. Aside from education funding, there are four times as many stories about sports than education policies in local, regional and state media outlets.
Roughly 13.6 percent of education media coverage focuses on sports, more than twice as much as the next most-discussed topics. Special events, such as open houses and field trips, and school funding each received roughly 5 percent of education coverage.
The study was authored by Andrew Campanella, a long time education reform advocate, and published by his media and public affairs firm. Campanella reviewed the past 25 years of education coverage and found several important items. He called it “the first-ever report to evaluate detailed, long-term trends in education reporting.”
The report reveals a lack of media interest in politics and policy when covering education issues.
For example, only 2.6 percent of education reporting from 2010 to 2014 focused on elections. Education coverage in the media drops during presidential election years by 6.5 percent compared to the previous year, according to Campanella.
Even with debate over contentious issues such as Common Core and standardized testing, coverage of education policy issues in 2014 was 36 percent lower than the 25-year average. Among the policy issues that do receive coverage, education funding and spending receives 5 percent of all coverage, more than double the coverage given to school choice, which gets 2.3 percent.
Although educational standards, such as Common Core, get relatively little media coverage, attention to them nearly doubled between 1990 and 2014. Coverage of school choice is also on the rise, while coverage of funding and spending has been falling steadily over the last 25 years.
Campanella also found that smaller media outlets are more likely to cover education than are national media outlets. “Local, regional, and state media outlets are three times more likely to cover K-12 education and schools than national media outlets,” Campanella wrote. He pointed out that, despite cutbacks in local news, education coverage in local, regional and state outlets was 7.7 percent higher than the 25-year average.
