Station consolidation means less local news
As the FCC investigates raising station capacity limits and station groups pursue more mega-mergers — including Nexstar’s proposed acquisition of Tegna — a new report commissioned by DirecTV shows that markets with a Big Four duopoly, triopoly or even quadropoly have fewer newsrooms and less diversity of voices.
“Recent history shows that when broadcasters acquire a second, third or fourth station in a local market, they consolidate news operations and leave behind one newsroom where there had been two, three or four, reducing the quality of local news,” DirecTV attorneys Michael Nilsson and Annick M. Banoun wrote in a letter sent to the FCC today. “This is not a speculative claim. In fact, in the context of the proposed Nexstar-Tegna transaction, we have submitted evidence showing that, for example, Nexstar has done this with every duopoly or triopoly it owns.”
DirecTV looked at every Nielsen DMA (designated market area) with Big Four affiliates operating under the same management team (excluding ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox O&Os), and found that there are 98 duopolies, 15 triopolies and three quadropolies. (And DirecTV didn’t even include combos with non-Big Four affiliates like The CW or My Network TV — even though a large number of Nexstar stations are affiliated with The CW, which the company owns. And DirecTV didn’t include stations considered “sidecar operations,” where companies like Nexstar work with stations owned by other entities. That would have made the apparent decline in local news even more telling.)
And as you might expect, according to DirecTV, those co-operated stations consolidate their online news onto a single site, use one news director for all stations and share journalists and anchors across those stations – rather than operating them as separate news operations.
“By our calculations, in the vast majority of markets in which every broadcaster today has a duopoly, triopoly or quadropoly, they have consolidated news operations,” the DirecTV filing said. “In most duopolies, triopolies and quadropolies, the co-owned stations offered essentially the same local news.”
To conduct its research, DirecTV first identified Big Four-affiliated duopolies, triopolies and quadropolies, in station groups including Nexstar, Sinclair, Scripps, Hearst, Lilly, Gray, Tegna and more. Station websites were looked at to see if more than one station was referenced, if there was a shared news director, and if there was shared news talent. Across all broadcast duopolies and beyond, 90.5% of news sites were shared, 98.2% of news directors were shared, and 97.3% of news talent was shared.
“The evidence conclusively shows that the consolidation of broadcasters reduces competition, output and quality of local news. Accordingly, we urge the Commission to reject broadcasters’ proposals that would create more duopolies, triopolies and quadropolies and reduce local news content,” Nilsson and Banoun wrote.
