A new report commissioned by DirecTV shows that Big Four duopoly, triple and even four-poly markets are seeing fewer newsrooms and less diversity of voices, as the FCC considers raising the cap on stations and broadcast groups pursue more big mergers, including Nexstar’s proposed acquisition of Tegna.
“Recent history has shown that when a station acquires a second, third, or fourth station in a local market, it consolidates its news operations, reducing two, three, or four newsrooms to one, and diminishing the quality of local news,” DirecTV attorneys Michael Nilsson and Annick M. Vanoon wrote in a letter to the FCC today. “This is not a speculative claim. In fact, in the context of the proposed Nexstar-Tegna transaction, we have provided evidence that we have done this in every duopoly or tripoly that Nexstar holds, for example.”
DirecTV looked at all Nielsen DMAs (Designated Market Areas) with four major affiliates (excluding ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox O&O) operating under the same management team and found that there are 98 duopolis, 15 triopolis, and 3 quadropolis. (And DirecTV didn’t even include any affiliations with non-Big Four affiliates like The CW or My Network TV, even though many of the Nexstar stations are affiliated with The CW, which the company owns.) DirecTV also didn’t include stations that are considered “sidecar operations,” where a company like Nexstar works with stations owned by other entities. The noticeable decline in news would have been even more pronounced.
And, as you might expect, DirecTV says these jointly managed stations consolidate online news into one site, have one news director for all stations, and share journalists and anchors across stations, rather than operating as separate news operations.
“According to our calculations, news operations are consolidated in the majority of markets where broadcasters currently have a duopoly, triopoly, or tetrapoly,” DirecTV’s filing states. “In most bipolar, tripolar, and quadrupolar countries, commonly owned stations provided essentially the same local news.”
To create the study, DirecTV first identified Dual-State, Triple-State, and Quad-State for Big Four affiliate stations across a group of stations that included Nexstar, Sinclair, Scripps, Hearst, Lilly, Gray, Tegna, and more. We looked at station websites to see if multiple stations were mentioned, if there was a shared news director, and if there was a shared news talent. Among all broadcast monopolies and non-monopolists, 90.5% of news sites, 98.2% of news directors, and 97.3% of news talents were shared.
“The evidence conclusively shows that station consolidation reduces competition, production, and quality of local news. Therefore, we urge the Commission to reject the station’s proposal to create more duopolies, trios, and quadruplets and reduce local news content,” Nilsson and Vannoun wrote.
