Local Broadcasters’ Quiet Consolidation
Posted August 27th, 2009 by Corie Wright
You probably haven’t heard, but broadcasters are devising a new scheme that may undermine the news and information you receive on your local TV newscast. In an effort to cut costs, broadcasters want to merge their newsroom operations, including personnel, rather than compete against each other.
These plans, sometimes called “shared services” or “news sharing,” haven’t received much press coverage, but in the last few months they have quietly cropped up all over the country.The agreements allow broadcasters to combine their news resources and staff so stations can reduce the cost of producing your daily newscast.
Broadcasters argue they need to consolidate their newsrooms due to declining ad revenue. But in the process, they are reducing the number of competing voices serving the community.
In Honolulu, the local NBC, CBS, and MyNetwork stations recently announced that they would create a virtual tri-oply by entering into a shared services agreement. The agreement condenses the news resources of the three stations into one consolidated joint operation which will provide news coverage for all three channels. Critics point out that TV execs make no pretense that the stations will maintain their editorial independence. Instead the three channels will show the same news content, reported on by the same staff – just branded with different network affiliations.
While broadcasters tout the benefits of news sharing, others are asking whether these agreements should be prohibited because they bypass the Federal Communications Commission’s longstanding media ownership rules.
For decades the FCC has maintained limits on local broadcast ownership to prevent consolidating the control of local news in the hands of a few companies, and to ensure that communities have access to local news from diverse and antagonistic sources. If the stations participating in these news sharing arrangements were actually commonly owned they would, in many cases, be in violation of local television broadcast ownership limits.
Broadcasters’ claims that these agreements don’t pose a problem are misleading. They argue that local news sharing doesn’t involve any “official” transfer of licenses, so there’s no violation of ownership rules. But stations participating in news sharing schemes are merging control of news, staff, and operations – in other words, they get all the advantages of common ownership without all the paperwork and pesky FCC oversight. For now at least, broadcasters appear to be getting off on a technicality.
Broadcast television remains the public’s primary source of local news. A decrease in competition among local broadcasters resulting from combining news operations may adversely affect access to local news and information. At a minimum, government regulators need to exercise some supervision over the arrangements to ensure that they are not abused.
The economic downturn may force media providers to face new economic realities – but unfettered collusion on the provision of local news or backdoor evisceration of the FCC ownership rules is not the solution.
