Change the Channels
Grab your remotes, and get ready to change the channels; there’s a new struggle against increased media consolidation, and chances are it’s coming to your town. In fact, it’s quite possible that TV stations in your own backyard have already consolidated, and you may not even know it’s happened. That’s because media companies have circumvented the Federal Communications Commission’s ownership rules in over 80 markets, quietly shuttering newsrooms at the expense of independent, local journalism.
Today, Free Press is launching a new campaign to demand an end to this covert consolidation. We’ve been studying these backroom deals for over a year, and today we are ready to unveil an exclusive interactive map detailing which media companies and stations are engaging in covert consolidation. We’re also releasing a new white paper, “Outsourcing the News”, which lays out our research and provides in-depth case studies of three covert consolidation deals.
Visit our new site, ChangetheChannels.org, to find out whether covert consolidation is impacting your community, and to learn what you can do about it.
What Exactly is Covert Consolidation?
Media consolidation is a dangerous problem, reducing the number of independent sources of news—that’s why there are rules to control it. But media companies have devised a way around those rules. Instead of one station buying the other, media companies are outsourcing their news and programming and handing over control of their newsrooms to their competitors. . In many cases, one news team produces a single newscast for multiple stations. The result: less news about your community and fewer journalists holding our leaders accountable.
Covert consolidation is already widespread. In its recent report, Information Needs of Communities, the FCC states that, "nearly one-third of TV stations say they are running news produced by another station."But the scope of this problem is far greater than the FCC report acknowledges. The FCC cites data that identifies “at least 25 television markets” where these deals are in place, but this only accounts for one kind of legal agreement that companies use. By broadening the scope of inquiry to include other similar agreements that also result in less competition, diversity and localism, the numbers increase significantly.
Free Press has identified almost 80 television markets where these deals are in place. In total, these deals involve more than 200 stations.
Report after report confirms that local TV is still the primary source for news in America. If local TV news doesn’t provide in-depth reporting from several independent sources, our communities won’t be informed, and our leaders can’t be held accountable. Perhaps worst of all, we’ll never know what we’re missing: Without journalists digging up stories, political scandals or corporate corruption can go completely undetected.
The FCC is currently reconsidering its media ownership rules, and the time is right to ask the FCC to get tough with stations that have circumvented FCC rules and abandoned local news. Click here to sign our letter urging the FCC to put an end to covert consolidation.
Free Press is a national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media. Free Press does not support or oppose any candidate for public office. Through education, organizing and advocacy, we promote diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media and universal access to communications.
Comments:
Change the Channels
Check out the interactive map to see consolidating newsrooms near you.
testimony to the Upper SC/Asheville conglomeration
Greenville is a progressive, conservative, high-powered business center. It is home both to Furman University (full-fledged, comparatively mainstream) and to Bob Jones University as well as one of the great SC technical colleges. Many foreign enterprises have US headquarters there. It is called a mini-Atlanta, partaking of the super-active I-85 corridor.
Spartanburg is a slower-moving, less political place also with a great tech school and a matches to Furman in Converse College and Wofford College. It has some connection with NC because of the numbers of NC/SC border citizens who shop and work there. (My family attended all these schools and my father and grandfather were small businessmen here.)
Asheville, NC is 50 minutes north and up the hill from both of these cities. The city has a large contrarian, liberal contingent in addition to retirees and native farmers and tradesman. The terrain discourages box stores: so, a tradition of buying locally has deepened.
A TV station in any of these towns would fail entirely to review and comment on events and trends in one of the others. Besides conglomerating US and World News, which are already suffering from a lack of local discussion, a collusion of Greenville and Asheville stations to tell local stories would fail
just from the descriptions above (which are based solely on my view).
A single swatch of I-26 can take one from Spartanburg through all of the Asheville southern market towns. Greenville has no such connection.
Likewise Asheville has a natural civic approach not fully shared by the SC towns. Stories selected from the wire and their placement on the air would differ from that chosen by a truly local broadcast.
This shrinking or packaging of the news is bad news for people who get their news from local TV stations. And most will be unaware, wedded as they probably are to a single channel's broadcast.
media consoolidation
I noticed it wasn't on your map, but in the Saginaw/Bay City/Midland/Flint MI market, CBS affiliate WNEM does the entire newscast on local FOX affiliate WSMH - same news crew, same set. It used to be called something silly like the "TV5 11 o'clock news at 10 on FOX66". They started doing this after a failed attempt by FOX66 to start their own news department.