Media Consolidation

Recent decades have seen major disruptions to the local media environment in the United States, with many previously independent local television outlets being consolidated into large conglomerates. Using a comprehensive new dataset of purchases of media outlets by conglomerate owners, we examine the effects of ownership change on news content, advertising, and viewership. We further explore whether consolidation effects are driven by general economic forces common to all conglomerate owners, or by owner-specific idiosyncratic differences in strategy and objectives. We find that conglomerate ownership impacts local coverage, but that the direction of the change is different across groups. Instead, all groups appear to increase advertising. Viewer reactions to content changes are small and not significantly different across ownership groups. These results suggest significant scope for owner influence on news content.