Is Consumer Demand Driving the Nationalization of Local Television News?

• In Event: Traditional News Industry Changes and Their Political Consequences

Abstract

Is consumer demand driving the nationalization of local television news?
Although the relevance of local television news to American politics has been apparent at least since Iyengar and Gilliam Jr.’s pioneering studies in the 1990s, this domain has taken on new urgency due to two related, long-run trends in American society. First, traditional print news media has faltered due to the internet (Abernathy, 2020). Second, Americans have “nationalized” in their political interest and behavior (Hopkins, 2018), and they subsequently are less knowledgeable and less interested in local politics and government. Local television news has retained substantial viewership (Allen et al, 2020) and, as a result, may be the most robust informational link between Americans and the places where they live. However, recent research suggests that the substance of local television news is changing: In particular, it is becoming more national and partisan—in other words, more like cable television news.
The nationalization of local news may erode its capacity to help citizens hold politicians accountable. Political information enables voters to reward or punish officials for their performance (Arnold, 2006; Snyder & Strömberg, 2010). A growing body of evidence suggests that local media inform voters and, thereby, can facilitate political accountability (Hopkins & Pettingill, 2018; Garz & Martin, 2021; Moskowitz, 2020; Larreguy et al., 2020). But the existence of media outlets does not necessarily improve political accountability. Instead, this relationship hinges on whether media outlets cover public affairs content and which voters choose to consume it (Larreguy et al., 2020).
There is an ongoing debate about whether the nationalization of local television news is driven primarily by supply or by demand. Research thus far has produced an ambivalent picture. Martin and McCrain (2019) examine how aggregate viewership changes following the introduction of more national, partisan content into local newscasts. Because they observe a drop in consumption following nationalization in content production, Martin and McCrain (2019) conclude that the nationalization of local television news is driven, at least in large part, by supply. However, reliance on aggregate data may mask complexity, and the correlations observed by Martin and McCrain is observationally equivalent with numerous explanations. There is also reason to think that waning consumer demand for local news has diminished local media organizations’ incentive to produce it. Hopkins (2018) and Hopkins and Gorton (2023) find that most consumers seemingly have little appetite for local news content.
Here, I offer a novel research design to resolve ambiguity through more precise measurement of treatment, audience, and exposure. I employ a novel research design harnessing Sinclair Broadcasting’s “must run” segments. These segments are carried by all Sinclair affiliates nationwide and engage with national politics, often with a partisan tone more similar to cable news than to local newscasts. As such, the Sinclair “must run” segments typify the nationalized content that Martin and McCrain identify as becoming more prevalent in local newscasts. Using a comprehensive data set of transcripts from local television news programming from late 2012 through 2022, I identify each instance of a Sinclair “must run” segment on every Sinclair affiliate inductively using NLP techniques. I subsequently use a panel of television viewing behavior for hundreds of thousands of Americans measured at the individual level to track exposure to these Sinclair “must run” segments. I estimate the effects of exposure to a Sinclair “must run” segment on subsequent media consumption. Because the “must run” segments are syndicated nationally by Sinclair, the timing of their appearance on local affiliates is pseudo-random. I use this randomness to measure if exposure to these segments leads to more or less television news consumption, whether this television news consumption is local or national and network or cable. I also test whether effects vary across audience subgroups, for instance comparing effects within Fox News and MSNBC viewers to effects within those who only consume local news on television.
This study seeks to illuminate the microfoundations of changing local media environments in the US. Because local television occupies an increasingly solitary role in covering state and local public affairs and public officials for a large audience, this study has broad relevance for the study of American politics. Local and state elections take place in low-information environments (Peterson, 2017), so the marginal value of political knowledge may be quite significant for voters. Preliminary results suggest that exposure to national, partisan content on local television news increases consumers’ subsequent television news consumption, relative to other local news consumers who did not see the same segment.

Author

• Sam Wolken, University of Pennsylvania