Local U.S. TV News Will Soon Be Entirely Right Wing Propaganda

Last week Republicans took the final steps toward destroying what's left of U.S. media consolidation laws. It didn't warrant much attention by the press; in part because corporate consolidation has been deadly for U.S. journalism already.

Republicans and their media arm(s) have two unsubtle goals: massive consolidation among right wing local broadcast companies, and the befuddlement of the U.S. electorate by way of propaganda pretending to be useful local TV news.

The Trump administration has been taking specific aim at the National Television Ownership Rule, which is supposed to prevent a single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the U.S.

They're doing this to the benefit of Nexstar Media Group and Tegna, who combined own more than 330 local TV news stations. Both companies have a history of kissing Donald Trump's ass, and are pursuing a $6.2 billion merger giving the new, bigger company dominion over more than half of U.S. households.

Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has been telling right wing propaganda websites this is all necessary to "restore balance" in media. Carr's announcement falsely claims he's looking to restore trust in media...by ensuring local broadcast TV news is dominated by a small handful of Trump-friendly broadcasters.

Carr's fellow Democratic FCC Commissioner, Anna Gomez, was quick to point out that this is technically theft of purportedly publicly-owned airwaves. And because Congressional law demands the FCC enforce media consolidation limits, the whole thing is brazenly illegal:

“This unlawful effort to hand control of the public airwaves to billionaire buddies of this administration will destroy local newsrooms, silence community reporting, and drive-up costs for the American families who depend on local stations for news and emergency alerts. A free and diverse media landscape depends on real limits on how much of the public airwaves any one company can control, and this FCC is now poised to allow local broadcasters to sell those airwaves off to the highest bidder."

Remember laws? Adorable.

Despite the 39% cap, TV broadcast news was already in trouble, thanks to the steady erosion of media ownership limits first mandated by Congress in 1941, and steadily eroded by corporate power and corruption ever since.

The sector is dominated by a handful of companies all owned by affluent right wing old white men, and their local "TV news" output consists of sloppy infotainment and the sort of right wing propaganda that pummels local communities with crime, homelessness, and drug abuse fear mongering.

Sinclair Broadcasting, for example, routinely airs anything from white-supremacy-friendly garbage to dangerous right wing health disinformation. When the company took over Seattle's ABC affiliate KOMO in 2018, the station's employees, disgusted by "must run" propaganda segments, began running for the exits.

Nexstar's local broadcast affiliates – and it's terrible Newsnation cable TV channel – routinely find themselves under fire for for the same behavior. Both Nexstar and Sinclair recently proved themselves very eager to help Trump demolish the First Amendment and censor comedians critical of the Presidency.

A fair assumption is that once Nexstar is allowed to buy Tegna, they'll move on to merge with Sinclair Broadcasting, putting the near-entirety of local broadcast TV under the control of right wing zealots loyal to Trumpism (or whatever unholy authoritarian iterations are belched forth in the decades to come).

Academics have been warning about this for decades, but this eight year old viral Deadspin video was arguably the most effective in demonstrating how local U.S. broadcast "news" has become a homogenized, bobble-headed infotainment and agitprop sewer where useful local journalism goes to die:

Deadspin has, I should point out, long-since been acquired and run into the ground by private equity.

Less real local journalism creates local news deserts, where there's less attention paid to local corruption or abuses by consolidated corporate power. In 2019 I spoke to researchers documenting how the supplanting of local journalism with right wing propaganda measurably swings election outcomes.

I often see a prevailing sentiment that this sort of thing doesn't matter because "nobody watches regular TV anymore," but that's simply not true. 65% to 70% of U.S. adults (roughly 170–180 million people) still at least occasionally watch local TV broadcasts via cable, antenna, satellite, or streaming.

That's 180 million households consuming lazy right wing propaganda in a country endlessly confused as to why such a large segment of the electorate routinely votes against their best self interests. The output of these local broadcasts is also tethered to national media and internet news sources, allowing the right wing to manufacture entire bogus news and outrage discourse cycles at will.

And this is just local news.

We're not even talking about Fox News, arguably the most successful modern media propaganda machine ever constructed. Or Twitter, which is now Elon Musk's personal right wing propaganda website. Or TikTok, which is now co-owned by Trump's billionaire ally Larry Ellison, who is also gobbling up networks like CBS and CNN with the unsubtle goal of replacing what was left of soggy corporate journalism with something arguably worse.

Then of course you have Breitbart, Dally Caller, The Daily Wire, the New York Post and the endless other right wing propaganda ops pretending to do useful journalism. And who can ignore the way U.S. oligarchs are buying papers like the Baltimore Sun, Washington Post, and LA Times to pummel us with oligarch-friendly gibberish.

With scattered exception, Democrats have been a feckless disaster when it comes to media policy and reform. Not only have they not had a cogent media reform plan anytime in the last quarter-century, establishment dems can't even effectively communicate the fact that there's an information war going on.

A war in which journalism, education, science, and informed consensus are losing, badly. Most Democrats can be found paying empty lip service to journalism before rubber stamping the next terrible merger, and traditionally have treated competent media regulation as a droll and unnecessary afterthought.

Assuming we can unfasten Trump's fangs from the neck of democracy, media reform is going to be absolutely essential if the country doesn't want to enjoy repeated, ongoing bouts with corporatocracy and fascism, culminating in the country splintering into a broken coagulation of bickering nation states.

Such reform has to center around restoring media consolidation limits, imposing media ownership diversity requirements, rebuilding our demolished public broadcasting systems, embracing meaningful antitrust reform, and establishing tougher new media literacy standards (Finland starts teaching children to spot propaganda and unreliable narrators as early as three-years-old).

A cornerstone of modern right wing power is propaganda, and if we can't muster a coherent response to right wing information warfare, we're going to be stuck under the bootheel of the dumbest, greediest motherfuckers imaginable, indefinitely.