In the golden age of local television, your evening news broadcast felt like a neighborhood conversation—stories about the high school football game, the latest city council squabble, or that quirky festival down the street. But flip on the local news today, and too often you're greeted with a carbon copy of the national cable grind: polarized talking heads dissecting Washington scandals, with a dash of weather and traffic to feign locality. This isn't coincidence; it's the result of decades-long media consolidation that nationalized local TV news, stripping it of its community roots and making it worse—less informative, more echo-chambered, and dangerously detached from the viewers it claims to serve.
The shift accelerated in the 1990s with deregulation, exploded in the 2010s through corporate acquisitions, and hit a low during the COVID-19 pandemic, where stations in markets like Seattle and Chicago parroted national narratives at the expense of vital local context.
The roots of this nationalization trace back to policy changes that prioritized profits over public service. Before the 1980s, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) enforced rules limiting how many stations one company could own, ensuring diverse voices and local focus. But the Reagan-era deregulation wave, culminating in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, blew those doors open. Ownership caps were relaxed— from 25% market share in 1985 to 35% by the early 2000s, eventually hitting 45%—allowing conglomerates to gobble up stations nationwide.
Suddenly, companies like Sinclair Broadcast Group, Nexstar Media Group, and Gray Television could amass empires. By the 2010s, these three alone controlled 40% of local news stations, present in over 80% of U.S. media markets, with $23 billion in deals reshaping the landscape.
This wasn't just about ownership; it was about centralizing control. To cut costs, owners implemented "shared services agreements" where one station produces news for multiple affiliates, leading to identical broadcasts across markets. A 2014 Pew Research Center report found that in nearly half of America's 210 TV markets, one company owns or operates at least two stations, resulting in eerily similar—or outright duplicate—newscasts. In Syracuse, New York, CBS and NBC affiliates air the same reporter-produced stories despite different anchors; in Honolulu, they sync up completely.
Consolidation breeds homogenization: less investigative journalism, fewer reporters on the ground, and a pivot to cheap national feeds from networks or in-house syndicates. Studies show Sinclair acquisitions, in particular, slash local event coverage by about 10%, replacing it with national politics laced with a right-wing slant.
The result? Local news becomes a vessel for corporate agendas, eroding trust and relevance.
Nowhere was this more evident—and more damaging—than during the COVID-19 crisis, when timely, hyper-local reporting could have saved lives by addressing community-specific risks, resources, and responses. Instead, consolidation funneled stations into uniform national narratives, amplifying misinformation and sidelining regional nuances. Research from 2021 highlighted how local TV's shift toward national content during the pandemic influenced public perceptions of health protocols, with owners like Sinclair dictating coverage tones.
Take Seattle, a early COVID hotspot where local factors like dense urban housing, tech worker vulnerabilities, and port-related exposures demanded tailored coverage. Sinclair-owned KOMO-TV, a dominant ABC affiliate, exemplified the nationalization trap. Rather than deeply probing Seattle's unique challenges—such as vaccine access disparities in immigrant communities or the impact on small businesses in Capitol Hill—KOMO often mirrored Sinclair's centralized feeds from "The National Desk," which expanded during the pandemic to push conservative-leaning segments on topics like reopenings and mask skepticism.
Sinclair's influence extended to health-protective behaviors; studies found their stations covered vaccination less favorably, aligning with national GOP narratives that downplayed mandates, even as King County saw summertime surges tied to local variants and tourism.
This homogenization meant Seattle viewers got blanket national death tolls and CDC updates, but scant reporting on, say, how the Alaska Airlines hub exacerbated spread or grassroots mutual aid in Rainier Valley. The loss? Communities missed hyper-local alerts, fostering confusion and hesitancy. As one analysis noted, Sinclair's model prioritizes national politics over local grit, turning stations into propaganda arms during crises.
Chicago, another epicenter with its sprawling metro inequalities, suffered similarly. In a city divided by zip codes—where South Side neighborhoods bore disproportionate case loads due to essential worker densities and healthcare deserts—local stations like ABC7 (WLS) and NBC5 (WMAQ) leaned heavily on national stories for engagement. A 2020 study of Chicago media found that content about national or out-of-state COVID developments garnered more clicks and shares than local reporting, incentivizing stations to chase viral national fear-mongering over granular community impacts.
Consolidation played a role: Many Chicago outlets operate under larger groups like Nexstar or Tribune (pre-merger), which centralize production and favor syndicated national segments to boost ad revenue amid pandemic downturns.
For instance, while WTTW provided some enterprise pieces on neighborhood hotspots like Rogers Park's 1,200+ cases, commercial stations often recycled CNN or Fox clips on federal stimulus or vaccine rollouts, ignoring Chicago-specific issues like the financial strain on Mercy Hospital or ICE facility protests amid lockdowns.
This uniformity amplified national divisions—pro-vax vs. anti-mask rhetoric—without contextualizing them for Windy City realities, contributing to uneven compliance and higher mortality in underserved areas.
The local news crisis, exacerbated by consolidation, paved the way for misinformation to fill voids, as stations cut staff and pivoted to safer, cheaper national fodder.
Why is this nationalization worse? It erodes democracy's foundation: informed local action. Homogenized news reduces competition for ideas, injects biases (Sinclair's rightward tilt being a prime example), and prioritizes spectacle over substance.
During COVID, this meant delayed community responses, as viewers tuned out irrelevant broadcasts. Broader studies confirm consolidation slightly boosts overall "quality" metrics like polish but tanks local relevance, with ad-heavy newscasts displacing journalism.
In critical times, when local news should bridge national policy to street-level effects, it instead amplifies echo chambers, fostering polarization and distrust.
Reversing this requires antitrust action to break up conglomerates and FCC rules mandating true local content quotas. Until then, local TV news remains a shadow of itself—nationalized, neutered, and no longer the community's watchdog. Viewers deserve better: news that reflects their backyard, not a boardroom's bottom line.
Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer.
