Station Consolidation Means Less Local News

As the FCC explores elevating station cap limits and station teams intention for more mega-mergers — including Nexstar‘s proposed acquisition of Tegna — a new report commissioned by DirecTV exhibits that markets with a Big Four duopoly, triopoly or even quadropoly have been left with fewer newsrooms and less range of voices.

“Recent history shows that when broadcasters acquire a second, third, or fourth station in a local market, they consolidate news operations, leaving one newsroom where there had been two, three, or four, thus decreasing the quality of local news,” wrote DirecTV attorneys Michael Nilsson and Annick M. Banoun in a letter despatched today to the FCC. “This is not a speculative claim. In fact, in the context of the proposed Nexstar-Tegna transaction, we’ve filed evidence demonstrating that Nexstar, for example, has done this with every duopoly or triopoly it possesses.”

DirecTV checked out every Nielsen DMA (designated market space) with Big Four associates operated under the same administration team (excluding ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox O&Os), and located that there are 98 duopolies, 15 triopolies and three quadropolies. (And DirecTV didn’t even embody combos with non-Big Four associates 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 embody stations that are thought of “sidecar operations,” the place corporations like Nexstar work with stations that are owned by other entities. That would have made the marked lower in local news even more telling.)

And as one may anticipate, according to DirecTV, those co-managed stations consolidate their on-line news to a single website, make the most of one news director across all stations and share journalists and anchors across those stations — instead of working them as distinct news operations.

“By our calculations, in the vast majority of markets in which any broadcaster holds a duopoly, triopoly, or quadropoly today, they have consolidated news operations,” the DirecTV submitting said. “In the majority of duopolies, triopolies, and quadropolies, the co-owned stations offered essentially the same local news.”

To create its examine, DirecTV first recognized Big Four affiliate duopolies, triopolies and quadropolies, across station teams including Nexstar, Sinclair, Scripps, Hearst, Lilly, Gray, Tegna and more. It checked out station web sites to see if more than one station was referenced, if there was a shared news director and if there was shared news expertise. Among all broadcast duopolies and past, 90.5% of news websites have been shared, 98.2% of news administrators have been shared and 97.3% of news expertise was shared.

“The evidence conclusively demonstrates that broadcaster consolidation reduces competition, output, and quality in local news. Accordingly, we urge the Commission to reject broadcasters’ proposals that would create more duopolies, triopolies, and quadropolies and decrease local news content,” Nilsson and Banoun wrote.