Nothing Unique About this News Story
Posted February 25th, 2010 by Josh Stearns
Just days after an important media ownership hearing in South Carolina, one of the nation’s biggest media conglomerates illustrates why Big Media mean fewer diverse voices and less local news.
On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission held a workshop in South Carolina as part of its regular review of media ownership laws. It was just two years ago that the FCC flew in the face of Congress and 99 percent of the American public and tried to relax these same ownership laws and permit more media cross-ownership.
The panels focused on broadcast radio and TV. In the past, many local TV and radio stations ignored these hearings. It has always been difficult to get the media to cover the policy debates that shape their industry.
So we were surprised and pleased to see two reports about the FCC event from local TV stations in South Carolina. However, when we went to the WSPA (CBS Channel 7) and WJBF (ABC channel 6) Web sites, it turns out that they posted the exact same story.
A case of plagiarism? Nope – actually something a little more disconcerting. The two supposedly different and competing news stations are engaged in “news sharing,” giving the public the same news and perspective on both channels.
WSPA and WJBF are owned by Media General, one of the nation’s largest media conglomerates. Usually ABC and CBS stations would compete in an effort to produce the best news and attract local viewers, but instead these two stations share newsroom operations and just recycle stories across their sites. If the FCC had any questions about the impact of media consolidation, they should just look no further than at how these South Carolina stations reported on the FCC hearing held in the same state.
It’s interesting to note that the author of the duplicate news story doesn’t seem to be employed by either newsroom (where are the reporters?), but by an advertising company owned by Media General. Joseph Kasko’s e-mail address is listed as jkasko@florencenews.com, but Florencenews.com redirects to an advertising agency for local newspapers.
Digging a little deeper gives us an even more troubling picture of the ways that media consolidation has gutted the media system in South Carolina and surrounding states. In addition to WSPA, WJBF lists four other partner newsrooms that they collaborate with: WSAV, SCNow, WRBL, WCBD. When they are not recycling news stories among these partner stations, WJBF is simply posting links to Associated Press stories – an accepted industry practice gone awry at this station; of the eight “top news stories” on WJBF, every single one was from the AP.
This is media consolidation at work. As more and more of our vital public airwaves are put in the hands of fewer and fewer companies, we can expect to see a lot more of this news sharing between stations, leaving us with less local news, more layoffs, and the same story on every channel.
