NewsBeat

22 NewsBeat October 2019 In the broadcast world, the story is similar. Large companies have been buying up local stations and cutting costs by centralizing the production of much of the content they air. Most notorious among them is Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns 193 stations across the country, reaching up to 40% of the U.S. population. Sinclair is known for enforcing a sharply conservative political slant on its broadcasts, providing "must-run" content that appears on every station the company owns. It regularly requires its stations to air commentary by Boris Epshteyn, a friend of President Donald Trump's family and a former political consultant to the president. Last year, a video went viral in which dozens of Sinclair anchors could be seen repeating, verbatim, a script that echoed Trump's complaints about "fake news." Easing antitrust Rules that formerly limited the ability of individual companies to own a dominant share of the media outlets in a specific market have been slowly eased over the years. Then, in 2017, the Federal Communications Commission gutted many of the remaining restrictions, opening the door to single companies dominating individual markets in both broadcast and print. The resulting consolidation has been "disastrous for local communities," said Craig Aaron, president and CEO of Free Press, an organization that advocates for the decentralization of media. "We've gone from a more diverse localized media system to one increasingly controlled by a small handful of companies." "You used to get in your car in New York and drive to, I don't know, Phoenix," said Aaron. "Everywhere along the way, you would get incredibly different local voices, local flavors, local music. Now, you're much more likely to get the same hit songs and Rush Limbaugh. So, we've lost some of that, you know, which I think has huge cultural value." The impact goes beyond culture, though, as Aaron and others have pointed out. It also has a direct impact on how Americans govern themselves. "When sources of local and regional news dry up or go away," Sullivan said, "there's research that shows that the way people engage politically changes. They are going to be less likely to vote, they become more polarized, because for many years, the local newspaper might have been a way that people in that community were sharing a set of facts. Now, that's gone or diminished." Last year, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University assembled a list of academic studies that tied the loss of local news sources to a decline in both the quantity and quality of citizens' civic engagement. Social media news To fill the gap, Sullivan said, people turn to less objective sources of news, like Facebook, or politically partisan cable television programming. "It is really a very damaging thing for the way we talk to each other, the way we feel as a community and the way we deal with politics," Sullivan said. Identifying the disease and cataloging the symptoms is one thing. But finding a cure that will return the U.S. to a more Jeffersonian media model won't be easy. Sullivan argued that the growth of nonprofit news organizations is a hopeful sign that an alternative to corporatized media may be available. Groups such as Report for America provide funding so that young journalists can work in local media outlets, providing them important training while supplementing understaffed news outlets. Some nonprofit publications like The Texas Tribune and Voice of San Diego have been able to make important contributions to their communities. But nonprofits can't bridge the gap entirely, and Sullivan and others worry that the advertising-dependent business model of traditional journalism – particularly newspapers – has been so thoroughly broken by the rise of digital media that trying to rebuild it on the same design will be impossible. That's why Aaron and his organization want the federal government to get involved. Free Press argues for a return to tighter federal restrictions on media consolidation, including the breakup of existing conglomerates. They also call for federal investment through grants or tax incentives to support local news. "If local journalism is important to making sure democracy survives, then we need the policies to actually match that need," he said. "And right now, we don't have them." — Reprinted from American Association of Newspaper Distributors (Continued from previous page)

• Cover