As the FCC explores raising station cap limits and station groups aim for more mega-mergers — including Nexstar‘s proposed acquisition of Tegna — a new report commissioned by DirecTV shows that markets with a Big Four duopoly, triopoly or even quadropoly have been left with fewer newsrooms and less diversity 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 sent 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 looked at every Nielsen DMA (designated market area) with Big Four affiliates operated under the same management team (excluding ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox O&Os), and found that there are 98 duopolies, 15 triopolies and three quadropolies. (And DirecTV didn’t even include combos with non-Big Four affiliates like The CW or My Network TV — even though a great number of Nexstar stations are affiliated with The CW, which the company owns. And DirecTV didn’t include stations that are considered “sidecar operations,” where companies like Nexstar work with stations that are owned by other entities. That would have made the marked decrease in local news even more telling.)
And as one might expect, according to DirecTV, those co-managed stations consolidate their online news to a single site, utilize one news director across all stations and share journalists and anchors across those stations — instead of operating 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 filing said. “In the majority of duopolies, triopolies, and quadropolies, the co-owned stations offered essentially the same local news.”
To create its study, DirecTV first identified Big Four affiliate duopolies, triopolies and quadropolies, across station groups including Nexstar, Sinclair, Scripps, Hearst, Lilly, Gray, Tegna and more. It looked at station websites to see if more than one station was referenced, if there was a shared news director and if there was shared news talent. Among all broadcast duopolies and beyond, 90.5% of news sites were shared, 98.2% of news directors were shared and 97.3% of news talent 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.
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