When Media Owners Become the Subject of News

By 2026, a single company will be able to reach 80% of American households via local television. This figure, resulting from the Tegna-Nexstar merger that the FCC approved under controversial conditions and without a public vote among commissioners — despite serious opposition from eight state attorneys general, DirecTV, bipartisan critics, and a preliminary injunction — sums up a decade of accelerated concentration in the American media landscape.

It is not simply a market question. When owners of news media are also major economic actors with direct interests in the sectors they cover, the press loses its primary function: holding power accountable.

The Essentials

  • The Tegna-Nexstar merger creates a group capable of reaching 80% of American households in local television, according to the CPJ (2026).
  • Since 2004, more than 2,700 local newspapers have closed in the United States, leaving “information deserts” in thousands of counties.
  • Owners of local channels and press titles increasingly belong to private equity funds or conglomerates for which information is merely one asset among others.
  • The FCC has gradually relaxed its anti-concentration rules since the 1990s, without Congress adopting a replacement legislative framework.
  • Alternative models exist and are gaining traction, from nonprofit media to journalist cooperatives, but their weight remains marginal compared to dominant players.

Twenty-Seven Hundred Newspapers Disappeared in Twenty Years

The map of American information deserts resembles a disease that progresses through the margins before reaching the center. Since 2004, more than 2,700 local newspapers have closed. According to the Medill 2025 report, approximately 50 million Americans have limited or no access to local information. In more than one-third of American counties, no daily newspaper exists any longer.

This movement is not the result of citizen disinterest in information. Media consumption studies show that Americans trust their local television stations and local newspapers more than major national media. It is precisely this capital of trust that makes these assets attractive to acquirers whose interests exceed journalism.

Private equity funds have purchased hundreds of titles over the 2010-2020 decade, often using the same operating manual: reduction of editorial staff, consolidation of content across multiple titles in the group, maximum monetization of newsroom real estate assets. Alden Global Capital, which today controls some of America’s oldest dailies including the Chicago Tribune and the Denver Post, has reduced editorial staff at its titles by more than 70% since entering as a shareholder, according to data from Harvard’s Nieman Lab.

The local press did not die from public disinterest. It was hollowed out by owners who had no editorial agenda.

Local Television Enters the Era of Regional Monopolies

The Tegna-Nexstar merger takes this movement to another level. Nexstar, already the largest American local television group with 200 stations in 116 markets, absorbs Tegna and its 64 stations to form an entity without precedent in the history of American audiovisual media.

The issue is not merely economic. Local television remains the primary vector of political information for Americans over 50. It covers local elections, city councils, judicial appointments, corruption scandals in state administrations. These subjects that major national networks do not cover, or cover only marginally, constitute the fabric of American representative democracy at the level where it actually functions for most citizens.

When a single company controls local information broadcast to 80% of households, the question of pluralism is not rhetorical. It is structural. The CPJ documents in its April 2026 report cases of editorial pressure exercised by owners on local newsrooms to avoid coverage of sensitive subjects affecting their commercial interests in the same geographic markets.

The FCC had regulatory tools to limit this concentration. Its cross-ownership rules and national coverage caps, put in place in the 1970s and 1980s, were progressively relaxed or neutralized between 1996 and 2024, under administrations from both parties. The 1996 Telecommunications Act paved the way for the first major mergers. Decisions in 2017 and 2021 completed the dismantling of remaining safeguards.

Crony Capitalism and the Press: A Thesis That Verifies Itself

Luigi Zingales, economist at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago and author of A Republic, Not an Empire, built part of his reflection on an observation that applies directly to the current situation: in a healthy market economy, companies make money by serving their customers better than their competitors. In crony capitalism, they make money by influencing the rules of the game in their favor. The difference between the two regimes is precisely what a free press is supposed to make visible.

The paradox here is complete. News media are the institutions that should expose crony capitalism. But when these media are owned by actors who themselves practice crony capitalism, the surveillance capacity collapses. A conglomerate that owns local television channels, real estate rights in the same markets, public contracts in multiple states, and business relationships with elected officials whose decisions its journalists must cover has no structural interest in vigorous investigative journalism.

This is not a matter of individual journalists’ bad faith. The pressure is institutional, diffuse, and often unspoken. It passes through choice of subjects, assignment decisions, resource allocations. Investigating a real estate developer who is also a shareholder of the group costs time and money. Broadcasting content federated from the group’s headquarters is cheaper. The economic calculation and the editorial calculation converge toward the same result: less local investigation, more centralized content flow.

This analysis overlaps with what Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson developed in their work on the capture of technological gains: institutions that should correct power imbalances are progressively integrated by the actors whose behavior they should control. The question “who guards the guardians?” is not new, but it takes on particular urgency when the guardians change hands.

A Counter-Reading: Concentration as a Response to Economic Collapse

It would be inaccurate to see in this concentration only an orchestrated conspiracy. A competing reading, defended notably by economists close to Tyler Cowen, suggests that media concentration is primarily a response to the collapse of the local press’s economic model, itself caused by the migration of advertising revenues to digital platforms.

Local newspapers lost 80% of their advertising revenues between 2000 and 2020, according to Pew Research Center data. In this context, consolidations and pooling would not be the cause of the weakening of the local press but its consequence. An actor of sufficient size can negotiate retransmission rights with cable operators, pool technical platforms, and finance regional investigation bureaus that isolated titles could no longer afford.

The argument has a measure of truth. Nexstar does indeed fund investigative teams in some of its markets. Large centralized channels sometimes broadcast quality investigations that independent local stations could not produce.

But this argument founders on a structural fact: consolidation has been massively used to reduce editorial staff, not to pool them toward investigation. Data from the Newspaper Association of America show that the number of jobs in American daily newspaper newsrooms fell from 74,000 in 2006 to fewer than 31,000 in 2022. This is not the pooling of existing editorial capacity; it is the destruction of that capacity.

Consolidation solved the economic problem for owners. It did not solve the democratic problem of local information.

Information Deserts and Their Measurable Political Effects

The consequences of this impoverishment are not abstract. Several empirical studies published over the past decade establish a causal link between the disappearance of local coverage and concrete political and civic indicators.

A study published in Urban Affairs Review by Meghan Rubado and Jay Jennings (2020) shows that the closure of a local newspaper significantly increases the probability that an incumbent mayor is reelected without serious opposition. The absence of coverage reduces the chances that challenger candidates emerge, lacking visibility. Another study, published in the Journal of Financial Economics, establishes a correlation between the presence of information deserts and increased municipal financing costs: obligations issued by jurisdictions without local journalistic coverage trade at a higher risk premium because financial markets factor in the fact that these jurisdictions face reduced oversight.

Local information is not a cultural good. It is a democratic and economic infrastructure whose absence has measurable costs.

The generational dimension of this problem deserves attention. Those under 35 consume their information predominantly via social media and messaging applications, channels that aggregate content produced elsewhere. If the sources that produce this content continue to disappear or consolidate, the quality of information available on these channels will deteriorate as well. Generations that grew up with the internet inherited a local information ecosystem that still functioned. Those arriving today inherit an ecosystem undergoing rapid consolidation.

What Is Gaining Traction Without Yet Carrying Weight

Alternatives exist and deserve to be taken seriously. Nonprofit media constitute the most dynamic sector. The Texas Tribune, founded in 2009 in Austin, has become one of the references for investigative journalism at the state level. ProPublica, based in New York, regularly publishes first-rate national investigations. The Institute for Nonprofit News now federates more than 400 members, compared to about fifty a decade ago.

Foundations like the Knight Foundation and MacArthur are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in support for independent local media. Journalist cooperatives are buying struggling titles to transform them into community-owned media, on the model of the Philadelphia Inquirer taken over by a local foundation in 2019.

These initiatives are real, documented, and carried by competent professionals. But their scale remains incommensurate with what they seek to compensate. All American nonprofit media combined employ approximately 20,000 journalists according to Nieman Lab estimates. This is half the jobs destroyed in daily press since 2006, and these media cover principally large urban centers, leaving rural and suburban counties largely beyond their geographic reach.

Philanthropy cannot structurally replace a market. It can maintain islands of excellence. It cannot cover 3,143 counties.

On the regulatory front, several states have undertaken legislative initiatives to support local press: tax credits for subscriptions to local newspapers in about fifteen states, direct aid to struggling media modeled on European approaches, local coverage obligations imposed on television operators in exchange for their licenses. These tools exist. Their adoption is fragmented and their aggregate effect remains modest.

At the federal level, the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, which provided for tax credits for subscriptions to local newspapers and for businesses that advertise in them, has been introduced to Congress several times without ever passing the voting threshold. The proposal is technically simple, politically blocked.

The Free Press as a Condition of Competitive Markets

There is an irony in the fact that the country that invented the First Amendment is one where media information concentration has reached this degree without serious public regulation.

This irony is partially explained by a persistent misunderstanding about the nature of press freedom. The First Amendment protects media against government censorship. It says nothing about media ownership structures or the economic conditions that allow independent journalism to exist. The formal freedom to publish is maintained; the material conditions that allow producing expensive, slow, and risky journalism are deteriorating.

This is precisely where Zingales’s thesis converges with a problem broader than media alone. Competitive capitalism needs institutions capable of monitoring and correcting abuses of dominant position. The free press is one of these institutions. When it is itself subject to the concentration logics it should cover, the system loses one of its self-correction mechanisms. The link between liberal democracy, competitive markets, and free press is not metaphorical: it is an institutional circuit where each component conditions the others.

One can debate the tools. The European public model poses problems of dependence on successive governments that American experience has historically sought to avoid. The nonprofit model has its merits but its scale limitations. The cooperative model is appealing and works at small scale. Targeted tax credits are less interventionist and more compatible with American liberal tradition.

The question is not choosing between markets and regulation. It is recognizing that the current information market produces measurable and documented market failures, and that certain forms of institutional correction are compatible with an open market economy. Other infrastructure sectors have been the subject of this reflection in the United States, from water to electricity to telecommunications. Local information deserves the same analytical treatment, without the idealization or dramatization that has thus far blocked debate.

What is ultimately at stake is less the survival of this or that title than the capacity of the American political system to produce information sufficiently distributed so that citizens can form independent judgments about their local officials. When this capacity collapses, the effects are not immediately visible. They appear in ten years, in uncontested elections, in uncontrolled municipal budgets, in scandals that were never covered.

Sources

  1. Committee to Protect Journalists — “How US media consolidation endangers press freedom” (April 2026): https://cpj.org/2026/04/how-us-media-consolidation-endangers-press-freedom/
  2. Medill Local News Initiative, Northwestern University — Medill State of Local News Report 2025: https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2025/report/
  3. Nieman Lab, Harvard University — data on press staffing and nonprofit media, no stable direct link
  4. Pew Research Center — State of the News Media, data on local press advertising revenues 2000-2020, no stable direct link
  5. Rubado M. and Jennings J. (2020) — “Political Consequences of the Endgame for Local Newspapers in the United States”, Urban Affairs Review: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1078087419838058
  6. Gao P., Lee B. and Murphy D. (2020) — “Financing Dies in Darkness?”, Journal of Financial Economics: https://www.rebuildlocalnews.org/local-news-shortage-leads-to-1-1-billion-in-extra-borrowing-costs-for-local-governments-and-taxpayers/
  7. Acemoglu D. and Johnson S. — Power and Progress (PublicAffairs, 2023)
  8. Zingales L. — A Republic, Not an Empire and work on crony capitalism (Booth School of Business)
  9. Newspaper Association of America — data on newsroom employment 2006-2022, no stable direct link
  10. Nexstar SEC Filing 8-K/A (Tegna merger, 2026): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001142417/000119312526257735/nxst-ex99_2.htm
  11. NPR — “FCC approves Nexstar-Tegna merger” (March-April 2026): https://www.npr.org/2026/04/14/nx-s1-5782043/nexstar-tegna-local-tv-deal-lawsuit-antitrust
  12. CRS — Stop the Presses? Newspapers in the Digital Age (Congress.gov, 2022): https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47018
  13. CJR — Alden Global Capital (Columbia Journalism Review): https://www.cjr.org/special_report/alden-global-capital-medianews-tribune-company.php