How Media Consolidation Affects the News You See
The new owner can change advertising and coverage.
- By
- March 04, 2025
- CBR - Economics
In the past decade, consolidation of American TV broadcasting has accelerated and put 40 percent of all local TV news stations under the control of the three largest broadcast conglomerates: Gray Television, Nexstar Media Group, and Sinclair Broadcast Group. Their stations—each company now owns about 100 affiliated with ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC—operate in more than 80 percent of US media markets.
Local news broadcasting changes when these media giants take over, and the effects vary by ownership group, find Stanford’s Gregory J. Martin, University of Bologna’s Nicola Mastrorocco, University of Utah’s Joshua McCrain, and the Hertie School’s Arianna Ornaghi. Sinclair tends to shrink coverage of local politics and politicians, Nexstar expands it, and Gray doesn’t change it much, they find. In addition, Nextar and Sinclair tend to run more ads during newscasts.
This is important because traditional media is still the main source of news about local politicians and policy issues, despite the rise of social media, the researchers argue. In democratic societies, people need timely, accurate information to make thoughtful decisions in the voting booth, they contend.
The researchers analyzed transcripts of local newscasts from 650 stations between 2013 and 2019, using data compiled by TVEyes and archived by Harmony Labs. They gauged the impact of media consolidation on local news advertising, revenue, and TV viewership by examining 2011–19 Nielsen Ad Intel Data housed at Chicago Booth’s Kilts Center for Marketing.
The transcripts enabled the researchers to measure whether Gray, Nexstar, and Sinclair aimed for economies of scale after buying local stations by airing more national content that can be shared across TV stations. The researchers combed the transcripts for mentions of local place names and names of local politicians. To separate the effects of an acquisition from changes that could affect all TV stations in a media market, they looked at variations in content across stations in the same market.
When Sinclair acquired a station, coverage of local events and local politics declined by about 10 percent, the study finds. Previous research by Martin and McCrain demonstrates that stations purchased by Sinclair adopted a more conservative framing of news stories and that the company produced content centrally that local stations were required to run.
Three owners, three strategies
When US media conglomerates acquired local TV stations, changes in news content varied by owner: Sinclair cut coverage of local events and politicians, Nexstar expanded its coverage, and Gray made minimal changes, according to the research.
Sinclair increased the amount of time sold for advertising in a half-hour broadcast by about 6.4 percent, find Martin, Mastrorocco, McCrain, and Ornaghi. The acquired newscasts shifted toward advertisers that spanned multiple markets and away from smaller, local advertisers.
The results for Sinclair support the intuition that conglomerates might standardize broadcasts nationwide and aim to get more advertising revenue out of their local stations. But on Nexstar-acquired stations, coverage of local events and politicians increased by about 8 percent, while a takeover by Gray led to no meaningful change in news content, the researchers find.
Like Sinclair, Nexstar increased the amount of advertising time per broadcast, by about 4.3 percent. After these increases, Sinclair and Nexstar ran about one additional 30-second ad for each half hour of local news.
The researchers find that the extra advertising noticeably increased revenue at stations acquired by Nexstar, but the effect on revenue at Sinclair acquisitions was more mixed. The average half-hour news broadcast in the sample ran about 8.5 minutes of ads worth $8,247, so a 5 percent increase in revenue equates to an extra $412. Overall, Gray made no change in the time sold for ads and generated no change in revenue.
Viewers didn’t respond to any changes by switching stations, the research find, and there was no significant change in viewers’ knowledge of local politics. The researchers estimate an increase in ratings for stations purchased by Nexstar, but they describe the finding as “weak evidence of a potentially small increase in viewership.”
Although viewers may not seem to mind much if their local news broadcast changes, the researchers still see cause for concern. “Lower viewer sensitivity to changes in content implies weaker constraints on owners’ interference with editorial decisions,” they write, “whether for purely economic or for political motives.”
They argue that existing duopoly rules, which limit how many stations a company can own in one media market, are important for preserving competition and offering alternatives, should one owner decide to make dramatic changes to local newscasts.
Ultimately, the effects of consolidation on local TV news broadcasts depend on who is doing the acquiring. The agenda of the new owner determines what viewers see—and what they don’t.
- Gregory J. Martin, Nicola Mastrorocco, Joshua McCrain, and Arianna Ornaghi, “Media Consolidation,” Working paper, September 2024.
- Gregory J. Martin and Joshua McCrain, “Local News and National Politics,” American Political Science Review, May 2019.
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