| For almost 40 years, television news has been the U.S. public's most-used information source. Local television news, in particular, has attracted a large percentage of viewers. Using an interpretive approach, this dissertation examines the meaning local news holds for viewers, arguing that such meaning must be understood apart from viewers' evaluations of the news programs themselves. Contrasting with theories of global homogenization, this study examines how local news is implicated in concepts of locality and sense of place.; The study is situated within a cultural studies, interpretive paradigm. It employed in-depth interviews with 40 individuals in 20 households, in which respondents discussed their news habits and attitudes as well as their ties to, and perceptions of, their locality. The households represent a mix of urban and suburban (the suburb of Littleton, Colorado, specifically), middle and upper middle class, and included several gay and lesbian families. The study is also connected to a much larger study of families and media use under the umbrella of the Symbolism, Media and the Lifecourse project, focusing on issues of identity, juxtaposition of self and family to media, and meanings made.; The dissertation argues that news is one of the windows through which people experience their locale, and that the connection is particularly vivid with television. Audience studies of news have typically focused on the uses and gratifications of news, on the effectiveness and recall of the information, or on the ideological implications of the messages presented. This study focuses on the level of symbolic meaning, arguing that grounding and place-based identity are ways of thinking about the viewers' relationship to local news that have not typically been conceptualized.; The most common discourses of the relationship of the audience to news have been connected either to uses and gratifications from the viewing experience, including message effectiveness and recall; to criticisms of the news genre, particularly local news; or to the ideological messages presumed to be delivered to viewers. This study examines the juxtaposition of those frames and a different understanding of the audience/news relationship based on sense of place and local identity. |
