I have been pointing out for years about how disadvantaged television viewers subscribing to the basic package offered by Dish TV are provided only one single full service news outlet via Fox News, no CNBC, no MSNBC, no CNN (except Headlines). From a sociological view, it does make sense that in those more rural parts of the country not serviced by cable providers, that those same TV viewers are most inclined to vote Republican and support the Tea Party. It is the only "tea" that's being served. The business model requires subscribers to pay extra for the opposing views to Fox. One could argue that the GOP is building it's poorer ranks due to Dish not providing the full pallet of political opinion in those demographics. The more media choices in a given geography generally results in a more diversely opinionated voting population. There is no great science to that.
Brian Stelter wrote for the New York Times a new twist to local TV news coverage where covert consolidation, the largely hidden practice that allows broadcasters to air the same newscast on multiple stations in the same community continues to create an atmosphere where only one broadcast owners point of view to his local broadcast sphere of influence is available.
The reason the issue remains important is that even as Internet use rises, local television remains the No. 1 source of news for vast majority Americans.
Brian points out how in San Angelo, Texas that calling a reporter at the CBS television station might result in "an anchor for the NBC station who calls back. Or it might be the news director who runs both stations’ news operations.
These Texas stations KLST and KSAN, though separately owned, operate from the same building and share office space, news video and scripts.
The stations "compete for viewers, but they cooperate in gathering the news — maintaining technically separate ownership, but sharing office space, news video and even the scripts written for their nightly news anchors. That is why viewers see the same segments on car accidents, the same interviews with local politicians, the same high school sports highlights.
The same kind of sharing takes place in dozens of other cities, from Burlington, Vt., where the Fox and ABC stations sometimes share anchors, to Honolulu, where the NBC and CBS stations broadcast the same morning show."
He cites a University of Delaware study that last year found sharing agreements in at least 83 of the nation’s 210 television markets.
"The agreements are more prevalent in smaller markets, although even cities as large as Denver have them. There, the study found, newscasts on the Fox station and the CW station had the same stories, scripts and graphics more than half the time.
The sharing is evident, too, in San Angelo, a low-rise city of 93,000 where the market price of West Texas intermediate crude is shown before the Dow, and where hunting and fishing times are shown after the weather report.
The anchors are different at the NBC station KSAN and the CBS station KLST, but they read similar scripts in side-by-side studios. It’s almost comical, for a viewer flipping the channel back and forth, to see identical segments about spot news and health. (The weather segments, however, have different graphics and hosts.)
KLST and KSAN have the only local television news in town. The Fox station in town, KIDY, rebroadcasts the news from San Antonio, a four-hour drive away. On the bottom of the screen, headlines from local newspapers scroll by, the product of another kind of a shared services agreement — this time with the E.W. Scripps Company, the owner of the papers."
This is where the Free Press people come in, as Paul interviewed them:
"Public interest groups have criticized the cutbacks at local newsrooms because they reduce the number of editorial voices in a given market. They assert that because TV stations hold licenses to the public airwaves, they have a responsibility to serve local communities. “The same cookie-cutter content above a different graphic doesn’t cut it,” said Craig Aaron, the head of Free Press, a nonprofit media reform group that has gathered case studies of sharing by stations.
“Worst of all, maybe, is that we’ll never know what’s missing — what dirt isn’t being dug up, what questions aren’t asked, what stories are going uncovered,” Mr. Aaron said, calling the sharing “covert consolidation.”
Some station owners say they would prefer to have more overt consolidation. They share, they say, because federal media ownership rules forbid them from outright ownership of more than one of the top stations in a single market. (Many exceptions exist, however, called duopolies.)
If Nexstar could own both KLST and KSAN in San Angelo, for instance, “we could generate further efficiencies,” Mr. Sook said, “and some of that additional operating income would be reinvested into the local news product.” That outcome, however, would still diminish the media diversity of the market, a major goal of the government’s ownership rules, which are now undergoing a review."
Follow the link to read the full article at the New York Times website. Free Press is a national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media. You can learn more about them at www.freepress.net
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photo of shared studio facility by Brian Stelter
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