Monopoly Hour

As local news outlets have withered over the past few decades, corporations have swooped in to consolidate the industry, often to the detriment of the residents left in “news deserts,” areas devoid of local government and slice-of-life coverage.

Over the past twenty years, the number of local news outlets has dramatically decreased. Since 2005, more than 3,200 newspapers nationwide have ceased operations, according to a 2024 study by Northwestern University. Digital operations have sprung up to fill the void, as well as local television news stations. However, digital outlets are still small in number, and television news stations often have “entrenched editorial practices” that rarely focus on municipal issues such as local government functions, according to a study by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy.

“Local television stations have traditionally focused extensively on breaking news, weather, and crime,” the study states. “It’s a proven marketing strategy.”

Local TV news experienced a spike in viewership during the COVID-19 pandemic, and some have begun to expand their coverage beyond crime and breaking news. But much like newspapers, TV news stations are struggling to sell airtime to businesses because Big Tech companies are hoovering up ad dollars, according to the National Association of Broadcasters.

One way broadcasters have fought the decline in advertising revenue is to consolidate.

In 2017, the Texas-based media company Nexstar purchased Media General, a news media company consisting of newspapers and television news stations, for $4.6 billion. Two years later, Nexstar purchased Tribune Media, which owned 42 forty-two stations, for $7.2 billion.

Nexstar agreed to sell off a number of its stations in both deals to abide by FCC regulations to remain under a 39 percent national audience reach. Still, the company claimed the deals expanded Nexstar’s geographic reach into previously untapped markets. In the Tribune deal, Nexstar also purchased WGN, a Chicago-based national news channel. WGN was rebranded as NewsNation in 2021, and the network’s face is now Chris Cuomo, brother of disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo (D).

Sinclair, based in Maryland, began its march from a small broadcast company into a behemoth in 1996 when it purchased a competitor, expanding its ownership to twenty-eight television stations in twenty-one markets, making it the largest television broadcaster not owned by a major network. By 2014, Sinclair had purchased multiple competitors, swelling its empire to 185 stations nationwide.

“We emerged not only as the leading industry consolidator, but one of the most diversified broadcasters and largest FOX, ABC, CBS, CW, and MyNetworkTV affiliate in the country,” the company states on its website.

A recent study from the media-focused Nieman Lab found that in 2024, 74 percent of Americans had “a lot of” or “some” trust in their local news outlets, and 85 percent reported that their local news outlets are “at least somewhat important to their community.”

While consolidation may have helped stations stay afloat, studies show that corporate mergers hurt local news coverage. Sinclair, in particular, forces many of its local news stations to carry “must-run” national news segments, which eat into time allotments for local news.

Forty-eight percent of Sinclair-owned stations rely on content handed down from their network managers, a Harvard study found.

The National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians–CWA, a labor union representing local news employees across the country, supports the ownership caps.

“Removing the national cap would harm workers in the broadcast industry, including NABET-CWA members, by lowering wages and benefits, reducing the number of jobs, and decreasing job security,” the union reportedly wrote in a comment letter to the FCC.

Delivering the Trump Message

Both Sinclair and Nexstar have been singled out for parroting Trump’s talking points.

Following Trump’s election in 2016, David D. Smith, Sinclair’s CEO and a longtime Republican Party donor, reportedly told Trump that “we are here to deliver your message.”

In 2018, nearly two hundred Sinclair stations were forced to broadcast word-for-word a segment in which news anchors read a script warning about fake news. The piece was broadly criticized as “Orwellian.” And in 2024, the company ran a story about former President Joe Biden potentially pooping his pants during a D-Day remembrance event in France.

What’s more, Sinclair stations have been criticized for “must-run” packages featuring reporting and commentary from Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump staffer during his 2016 presidential campaign who was investigated in November 2024 for allegedly operating a pay-to-play scheme for cabinet picks in the then-upcoming Trump administration.

In 2024, Nexstar’s CEO, David Sook, said that “fact-based journalism” will make a comeback and expressed a desire to eliminate “activist journalism.”

Since winning the presidential election in November 2024, Trump has sued multiple news outlets for a variety of reasons. In December, ABC settled a $15 million lawsuit stemming from one of the network’s anchors falsely stating that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” Paramount Global, parent company of CBS, agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit over editing an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential campaign to allegedly “tip the scales in favor of the Democratic Party.”

Just weeks ago, Trump sued the Wall Street Journal, claiming that the newspaper defamed him when it published a story about an alleged letter Trump wrote to notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

If the media conglomerates convince the FCC to gut the ownership caps, experts say pro-Trump messaging could creep even further into stories disguised as local journalism.

“It will increase politically conservative voices in a time when the Trump administration is engaged in various ways to suppress and censor media engaging in investigative reporting and holding the administration accountable,” said Chester with the Center for Digital Democracy.

“We Need to Move Quickly”

For decades, broadcast groups have been attempting to gut the ownership caps, which were adopted in the early 1940s during the Roosevelt administration to encourage healthy competition in broadcast markets.

The current attempt to kill the rule stems from a 2017 FCC rulemaking announcement under the first Trump administration seeking comments on “whether to retain, modify, or eliminate its rule limiting entities from owning or controlling broadcast television stations that, in the aggregate, reach more than 39 [percent] of the television audience households in the United States.”

The effort stalled, but as the new FCC chair, Carr has renewed interest in revising the ownership rules.

In March, Carr said during an interview on Nexstar’s NewsNation channel that the state of local news is at a “break-the-glass moment” and that the ownership rules are hurting local news outlets.

“We need to move very quickly right now to make sure that broadcasters have access to the resources,” he said. “Fundamentally, advertising is what supports local journalism, and as Big Tech companies have been rising, they’ve been taking so many of those local ad dollars.”

He argued that the policy mandating diversity in broadcasting ownership has resulted in “all these stations that are underinvested in.”

“We have these misguided views of diversity of ownership when the reality is we need to let some of these broadcasters get to scale,” he said.

The following month, Sinclair, Nexstar, and their lobbyists echoed Carr’s sentiments in comment letters to the FCC requesting elimination of the ownership caps.

“Elimination of the National Ownership Cap is within the FCC’s statutory authority, as Chairman Carr has acknowledged, and can be done immediately pursuant to an ongoing rulemaking proceeding initiated in 2017,” Sinclair wrote in an April letter to the Commission. The broadcaster also stated that “by far the most important actions the commission can take are the elimination of the local and national ownership caps and an expeditious proceeding” to rework broadcasting regulations.

Sinclair has spent more than $5.3 million since January 2020 lobbying mostly Congress and the FCC on “competition issues” and “issues related to media ownership and ownership caps,” among other matters, disclosures show.

Sinclair said that local news broadcasters have to fight “unregulated new Big Tech entrants with both hands tied behind our backs due to archaic regulatory structures that fail to reflect current competitive conditions.”

Nexstar and the National Association of Broadcasters leveled similar complaints, with the broadcasters’ lobbying group stating that the commission’s top priority should be “jettisoning its antiquated ownership rules.”

“No need is more pressing across the board, and the ownership rules unfairly skew the market in favor of Big Tech [and] streaming platforms,” the National Association of Broadcasters wrote in an April letter. “These asymmetric rules prevent broadcasters from effectively competing for audiences, vital advertising dollars, and high-quality programming in today’s marketplace.”

The association has spent more than $66.9 million since January 2020 lobbying Congress, the White House, the FCC, and other regulators on “issues relating to the Federal Communications Commission’s rules governing broadcast ownership” and other matters, disclosures show.

The National Association of Broadcasters’ board of directors includes representatives from Nexstar, Sinclair, NBCUniversal, San Francisco Chronicle owner Hearst, and other organizations.

Nexstar has spent nearly $4.5 million since January 2020 lobbying similar regulators on “local and national broadcast ownership cap and related rules,” and other matters, disclosures show. In December, the company’s CEO said the incoming Trump administration could be a boon for deregulation.

“We think the prospects of actually achieving deregulation are probably better than they have been at any point in the recent past,” Sook said.

The broadcasters and their lobbying group’s complaints about Big Tech are largely overblown, according to Matt Wood, vice president of policy and general counsel at Free Press. Wood said that while the broadcasters complain about losing ad revenue to Big Tech, they are still reporting large revenues to shareholders, with Nexstar reporting nearly $1.5 billion in revenue from October to December 2024. Wood also questioned the idea that ownership caps are the cause of tech companies’ media dominance.

“The notion that if we let Sinclair, which has a particular partisan viewpoint, [expand] across the country, that they’re suddenly going to be effectively competing against Google, it just doesn’t make any sense on paper or in reality,” he told the Lever.