Speakers: 

Benjamin E. Bagozzi - Professor, Department of Political Science & International Relations, College of Arts & Sciences, University of Delaware

Danilo Yanich - Professor, Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration, University of Delaware

"Local U.S. television news provides citizens with crucial local information, particularly during heightened political, social, or environmental salience. Yet local television news is under increased pressure to consolidate, which may serve to de-localize local news reporting by duplicating news content delivery across local broadcast stations.

This report examines two fundamental questions. Stripped to their bare essentials, they are:

1. Who controls what?

2. Does that control affect news content?

We constructed three databases to address these questions. The databases span multiple characteristics of local broadcast stations and the actual news content (i.e., transcript text) each station aired. Our content database included the news broadcasts of 861 local stations in all 210 television markets in the U.S. that presented news content over three months in the fall of 2019. It is the largest such database in existence.

We chose a period before the COVID pandemic so that a single overwhelming story would not affect coverage. We employed automated text reuse methods to measure how local broadcast station pairs duplicated (exact text reuse) each other’s news content. We applied a high threshold for duplication: to be considered duplication, 50% of the broadcast news content (excluding sports, weather, and commercials) of a station pair had to be an exact match."