Musician Don Henley once wrote, “The more I know, the less I understand.” He couldn’t have captured today’s chaotic media and information environment any better.
From “flood the zone” propaganda to AI deepfakes to bot armies spreading mass disinformation — including attacks specifically targeting Latino communities ahead of the 2024 election — it’s never been so hard to figure out what matters and what’s real.
For decades, trusted local broadcast journalists have helped people in the United States understand the news and how it affects their communities. However, massive newsroom job cuts are making that more and more difficult.
Giant, corporate station conglomerates like Nexstar, Tegna and Sinclair have aggressively swallowed up local stations, axing experienced journalists, cutting entry-level opportunities for the next generation of reporters, and, instead, delivering centralized, corporate, commodity “news” to communities across the country. If this trend continues, the nation will find itself lost in today’s information chaos.
The past decade has seen $23 billion in local broadcast acquisitions and deals, transforming an industry that once featured independent local voices and newsrooms into a near oligarchy of corporate behemoths in which “the three largest owners control 40 percent of all local news stations and are present in over 80 percent of media markets.”
The statistics are staggering. Nexstar owns stations in 114 markets, reaching 70 percent of the nation’s 125 million TV homes, and is in the process of acquiring the fourth biggest player in the market, Tegna, which reaches 52 markets. Gray Media (121 markets) and Sinclair (79 and threatening further acquisitions) are also behemoths.
This consolidation “de-localizes” news in multiple ways. Sinclair controversially forces local stations to run centralized stories and politicized editorials pushed down from corporate headquarters. Even more widespread is the direct “duplication” of news, where multiple stations owned by a single group in a single market simply broadcast the same news stories, word for word. According to a recent study, 40 percent of U.S. media markets experience news duplication covering 182 different stations, with Nexstar documented as the worst offender.
It’s a system that feels increasingly like something out of George Orwell’s “1984” — where “Big Brother” doesn’t just watch but decides what gets said and what doesn’t.
For journalists, this extraordinary degree of concentration has meant lost jobs and lost editorial control, undermining their ability to serve and inform local communities — a key component of any genuine democracy.
Local broadcast news jobs dropped 3 percent last year and Nexstar, Gray Media, Tegna and Scripps have all recently announced significant layoffs, while Sinclair has been eliminating news staff at local stations for years. As one recent analysis put it, “expense cuts will be the primary goal” of the coming wave of consolidation, and, as a result, “a lot of good people are going to lose their jobs.”
I’ve been there and seen how communities are devastated when trusted local journalists are summarily let go. The damage will be felt for decades, as abrupt job cuts close entry points and career pathways for new journalists to learn the ropes, gain experience and build trust with audiences.
The costs are exceptionally high for journalists from historically underrepresented communities who often seem to end first on the firing line when corporate “efficiency” demands layoffs and cuts. That shortchanges audiences who lose out as fresh viewpoints and diverse perspectives are lost. In the end, if we don’t invest in the next generation of journalists — representing all of our nation’s “walks of life” — who will document and communicate the coming chapters of the United States’ story?
Over the last two decades, the United States has largely stood by and watched as over one-third of local newspapers closed and two-thirds of print journalists lost their jobs. The results of that irreplaceable loss are all around us every day, as the quality, richness and diversity of news viewpoints and perspectives erode.
We can’t stand by and let the mega-station groups decimate local broadcast news in the same way. We must work to preserve and grow our country’s history and heritage of strong, community-based local journalism.