Social media’s rise as a dominant news source has disrupted local newspapers and other legacy media models. But it has yet to unseat Americans’ most preferred source of local news: television.
“People tend to focus on social media and think of legacy media as obsolete,” says Gregory Martin, an associate professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He wants to help correct that common misconception: “TV is still one of the most important sources of news in the U.S.”
Yet the broadcast news landscape is changing as ownership of the U.S. television market consolidates. In the past decade alone, there have been $23 billion in broadcast TV ownership deals, further concentrating an industry in which the three largest owners control 40% of all local news stations and are present in over 80% of media markets. This trend has fed concerns that the quality of local news is suffering.
In 2019, Martin wrote a paper with Joshua McCrain of the University of Utah that analyzed how a wave of acquisitions by the Sinclair Media Group affected its stations’ news content. They found that new ownership typically led to a de-emphasis on local news and more coverage of national politics.
In a new paper written with McCrain, Nicola Mastrorocco of the University of Bologna, and Arianna Ornaghi of the Hertie School in Berlin, Martin expands the scope of the analysis to see whether a similar pattern follows acquisitions by other major media conglomerates. “We wanted to understand whether the changes that we saw at Sinclair were a Sinclair-specific effect – something about the particular ownership and management there – or whether they were general forces that result from consolidation per se,” Martin says.
They were surprised to find just one commonality in how local stations were run post-acquisition: Advertising increased during newscasts. The localness of news coverage also tended to shift, but the direction of the change depended on the new owner. And regardless of the changes to how stations covered the news, viewership tended to remain steady.
Martin’s team points out that station owners might interpret this lack of response from viewers as an absence of guardrails, emboldening them to make more changes to newscasts that suit their financial interests or political leanings. Regulators should take note, the researchers say, because safeguarding the production of quality local news is in our collective interest.
“The news industry is unlike others in one critical respect: Its product is a fundamental input to any well-functioning democratic society,” Martin and his coauthors write.“Particularly at the local level, where there exist fewer alternative sources of information, traditional media outlets remain the primary producers of information about politicians and policy issues on which the voting public relies.”
Consolidation and coverage
In the 1990s, Sinclar, Gray Television, and Nexstar Media Group began buying up local stations, becoming the biggest players in the U.S. TV industry. In their study, the researchers focused on more than 215 acquisitions by these three owners between 2010 and 2020. To analyze the broader patterns that emerged from this consolidation, they also examined transcripts of news content, advertising records, viewership stats, and surveys of political knowledge.
The news industry is unlike others in one critical respect: Its product is a fundamental input to any well-functioning democratic society.”Gregory Martin
One of the team’s central research questions was whether acquisition by one of these conglomerates led to more or less local news coverage – or no significant change at all. Martin acknowledges that going in he could make a plausible case for a dramatic change in either direction. On the one hand, a major media company with news stations across the country could slash costs by centralizing news production and producing segments about national news and politics that could be shown anywhere in the country. On the other hand, news stations attract advertisers by differentiating their content; increasing the localness of their programming might be an effective way to do that.
To find out how localness of coverage changes post-acquisition during their sample period, the researchers first obtained transcripts of all local TV newscasts from about 650 stations across the country. They used two measures to capture the localness of the content: mentions of municipalities within the station’s market and references to local politicians. “It’s hard to do a story on a local issue without mentioning a place,” Martin says.
The conglomerate owners did tend to make changes to local coverage after acquisitions – but the nature of those changes varied dramatically. At Sinclair-run stations, local coverage dropped by about 10%, in line with Martin and McCrain’s previous research. However, at stations bought by Nexstar, mentions of local places and politicians shot up. The level of local coverage at Gray-owned stations didn’t change.
While the researchers don’t have the data necessary to determine whether changes at specific stations affected viewers’ knowledge of local politics, Martin points to a finding that underscores the role of local TV news in informing its viewers. Across the board, stations were much more likely to devote coverage to members of Congress whose districts aligned closely with their media markets. In surveys, people who lived in a congressional district that closely overlapped with their local station’s market were more able to identify their representative or express an opinion about them, and vice versa.
“That effect is pretty large; it’s comparable to the effect of having a college education on knowing who the congressperson is,” Martin says. “And so, in the aggregate, TV coverage does seem to matter for citizens’ knowledge of their representatives.”
The local angle
Martin acknowledges that a quick interpretation of the results might lead regulators to conclude they have no additional role to play in shoring up the quality of local TV news in the face of massive consolidation. Yet Martin says that read would be mistaken. His research revealed patterns suggesting that consolidation matters quite a bit – it’s just that the nature of subsequent changes depends on the owner.
“If the aim of regulators is to preserve some media diversity – and this is one of the explicit aims that are stated in the rules around broadcast licensing – there are some tools out there that are currently not used a lot,” Martin says.
For one thing, he says, regulators like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could do a better job of tracking and emphasizing the importance of some of the records they require from broadcasters. For example, stations must document the important local news stories they cover as a condition of maintaining a broadcast license. But Martin says those records vary widely in substance and depth, leading him to believe they are not closely monitored.
However, limits on market share and national reach are strictly enforced by the FCC. However, based on this study, conglomerate owners’ market share doesn’t appear to be strongly related to how they approach local coverage.
“If the goal is really to preserve locally important coverage, then we should think more about regulating that directly – rather than indirectly through these caps on ownership concentration,” Martin says. “The focus should be on enforcing the rules that require stations to produce public-service programming.”
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This story was originally published by Stanford Graduate School of Business.