The Precarious Situation of American Media
The First Amendment is predicated on the idea of a free and diverse marketplace of ideas. Yet, since 2005, over 2,900 newspapers across the United States have closed. In that same time period, the country lost nearly 43,000 journalists, almost two-thirds of the country’s total journalists. Now, of the 3,143 counties in the US, more than half have either no local news source or only one remaining outlet: roughly 204 have no local outlet at all, creating “news deserts.” Consequently, local news coverage has greatly suffered, depriving residents of crucial information about their communities.
However, not just local news outlets are in peril. Traditional media outlets nationwide are struggling with declining revenue and audiences, often leading to media consolidation by private equity and hedge funds or the closure of those newspapers altogether.
The rise of large tech companies as dominant news platforms has disrupted traditional media’s business models, while media consolidation—often permitted by antitrust exemptions—has further weakened the diversity and independence of journalism in the United States. With journalism in such a fragile place, a precarious environment threatens American democracy.
The Dangers of Losing Local News and Media Consolidation on Communities
Over half of US counties have no or minimal access to local news, greatly harming communities in nearly every facet of life: from local government to community engagement to public health and corporate crime. And, as more and more media platforms are consolidated and the diversity of platforms continues to shrink, the marketplace of ideas becomes increasingly homogenized.
Democracy functions best with an informed electorate. Yet, the loss of local news has an insidious effect on democracy by reducing knowledge of local government elections and government activity. Declining local coverage directly leads to lower voting rates and less informed voters; conversely, those who follow local news are more likely to vote in elections. These effects are not strictly limited to inattentive citizens as previously thought by many political scientists. A 2015 study found that a lack of exposure to local news affects all people regardless of their level of political awareness. The study also highlighted, unsurprisingly, that local newspapers devote much more coverage to local elections than slightly larger outlets that serve multiple districts because they choose to prioritize more nationally-focused news due to broader readership. Furthermore, communities experiencing reduced local news coverage encounter higher taxes and increased government corruption, likely resulting from diminished accountability and decreased public oversight.
The decline in local news coverage further exacerbates polarization and reduces civic cohesion. When communities lack access to diverse local reporting, citizens are more likely to rely on national news sources or social media platforms, which often amplify ideological divisions. With reduced access to local news, voters tend to align their votes in state and local elections with their national partisan preferences. Basing decisions on national politics reduces the importance of state and local issues; given the intense polarization of national politics, this reliance on national news serves to further divide local politics that would otherwise have the ability to unify a community.
Additionally, consumers typically receive little explicit notice regarding the ownership of their local station, preventing them from clearly understanding the source’s potential political biases—a clarity more readily available with explicitly partisan national outlets like MSNBC or Fox News.
Compounding the issue is the increasing concentration of media ownership. Large conglomerates now control a significant portion of local newspapers and broadcast outlets. Such consolidation often prioritizes profit over public service, resulting in cost-cutting measures like newsroom layoffs and reduced investigative reporting.
It is, however, important to note that some mergers or acquisitions by a private equity firm, in the short term, are necessary to keep struggling newspapers open given the difficult landscape. Newspapers acquired by private equity firms are more likely to decrease their volume of local stories, but are less likely to close down completely.
In many cases, though, local outlets owned by these large firms shift toward centralized editorial boards, replacing independent, community-focused journalism. These conglomerate-owned local stations now focus on national politics for financial reasons. One source can produce a national story and be sent to unlimited stations, which offers huge cost savings to a conglomerate with hundreds of outlets. Consequently, residents lose access to in-depth reporting on critical local issues, such as school board decisions, zoning changes, or environmental hazards. A local story, on the other hand, requires its own local reporter that cannot as easily be sent to hundreds of national stations.
The State of Traditional Media
Since the rise of the internet in the early 2000s, most newspapers have struggled to keep up financially. Newspapers make the majority of their revenue from advertising, but advertising revenue has plummeted in the past two decades. From 2005 to 2021, newspaper advertising revenue fell from $49.4 billion to $10.17 billion.
Newspapers have also faced declining audiences, both print and digital. Counting both digital subscriptions and print circulation, daily newspaper circulation dropped to under 21 million in 2022 from over 40 million in the early 2000s. Out of 136 papers included in a Pew Research analysis, 120 of them experienced declines in weekday circulation in 2022. Even the largest newspapers—The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal—have struggled to attract audiences for their print subscriptions. And digitally, the nation’s 50 largest newspapers have experienced declining traffic: in the fourth quarter of 2022, the average number of unique monthly visitors fell 20% from the same period in 2021.
A crucial reason behind journalism’s decline is because dominant online platforms, such as Google and Facebook, redirect the flow of advertising revenue from publishers to themselves. Instead of visiting journalism outlets directly, readers now go through Google and Facebook. As the two tech companies grew in size, and as news consumption shifted online, readers increasingly accessed content through aggregators like Google News, Facebook Timeline, and similar platforms. This trend disproportionately affects smaller, more local publishers (unlike major outlets like The New York Times which can attract readers directly to its website) as they obtain most of their traffic through internet search and social media. More than half of Americans get their news from social media, and 65% use search engines like Google, further consolidating power within these platforms at the expense of traditional media.
As a result of the decline in profitability, media organizations have been forced to sell to larger conglomerates, leading to significant consolidation in the industry and placing control of much of the nation’s news production in the hands of a few dominant corporations. The financial struggles of smaller outlets, exacerbated by the dominance of digital ad markets, have left local newspapers vulnerable to acquisition by hedge funds and venture capital firms more focused on profit than journalistic integrity. This wave of consolidation has significantly reduced the diversity of voices and perspectives in the media landscape. Today, more than half of major daily newspapers in the United States are owned by just seven large companies, including Gannett by GateHouse, Hearst, and Alden Global Capital, which collectively control hundreds of local and regional outlets. These acquisitions have often resulted in homogenized content, fewer local voices, and declining programming quality.
Antitrust Exemptions and Their Consequences
In light of the challenges facing the traditional media industry, some firms have called for greater leniency under federal antitrust laws. Antitrust laws aim to promote economic competition and prevent unjustified monopolies through prohibiting mergers and anticompetitive behavior. Newspaper owners and journalists have advocated for expanded antitrust exemptions to allow for collaboration on joint advertising, shared readership fees, online content access fees, and joint reporting efforts—essentially throwing the industry a lifeline. Despite the seemingly good intentions, antitrust exemptions generally aid only the beneficiaries of the law while harming the consumers and economy.
In the 1960s, media leaders lobbied Congress and the Nixon administration to enact The Newspaper Preservation Act (NPA) to allow competing newspapers to legally engage in anticompetitive behavior. Struggling, the Hearst Corporation’s San Francisco newspaper The Examiner entered into a Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) with its primary competitor, The San Francisco Chronicle. The JOA allowed the two newspapers to collectively fix the prices for their papers’ subscriptions and advertising rates and jointly manage the papers’ circulation, sales, printing, distribution, and personnel, on the condition the two news and editorial departments remained separate to promote a marketplace of diverse ideas. In subsequent years, under the NPA, which Congress enacted in 1970, more newspapers entered into JOAs with one another.
However, JOAs under the NPA did not have its intended consequences. Smaller newspapers often suffered while larger newspapers, the very ones that did not need antitrust immunity to succeed, prospered. Larger newspapers that entered into JOAs with smaller papers often employed abusive tactics. For example, in 2003, the Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecuted a JOA in West Virginia because of abusive tactics. The DOJ alleged that the Daily Gazette Company, which published The Charleston Gazette, bought its JOA partner’s newspaper, the Daily Mail, just to shut it down to make Charleston a single newspaper town. In the early 2000s, the Seattle Times noted that its JOA “didn’t work and was a drain of resources.”
In a letter to Congress, generally regarding JOAs, the DOJ concluded: “The antitrust laws are the chief legal protector of the free-market principles on which the American economy is based. Companies free from competitive pressures have incentives to raise prices, reduce output, and limit investments in expansion and innovation to the detriment of the American consumer. Accordingly, the Department has historically opposed efforts to create sector-specific exemptions from the antitrust laws.”
The Journalism Competition And Preservation Act
In 2021, US Senator Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn, introduced the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) to allow news organizations to band together into “joint negotiating entities” to negotiate for payment from Big Tech platforms, such as Google and Facebook, for “accessing” their content. While the bill initially gathered support for its stated goal of addressing the financial struggles of local journalism, many notable critics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Knowledge, voiced their concerns.
Critics of the bill believe that rather than striking at the heart of the issue, the dominance and control of Big Tech platforms, the bill instead risks repeating mistakes made with the NPA by benefiting a few more powerful media conglomerates, many of which are owned by hedge funds or private equity firms, instead of smaller, more local papers. As such, these critics of the bill fear news giants with the greatest leverage would dominate negotiations, leaving small outlets with diverse or dissenting opinions out of the conversation. The dominant tech companies could choose to negotiate more with the larger media conglomerates to maximize their profits, instead of with the smaller and less wealthy newspapers that would hold less of a sway.
In response to another revised version of the JCPA in 2023, Lisa Macpherson, a Senior Policy Analyst at Public Knowledge stated that “Allowing the largest media conglomerates – like Alden Global Capital, Gannett, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and News Corp – to collude on the terms of access and value of their content will hurt competition and make our news landscape worse, not better. In a bill that is supposedly meant to encourage local journalism, there is no accountability for how the money is spent.” As Macpherson points out, a large fear surrounding the JCPA is the potential for collusion between the dominant media and tech industries. While the idea to help the journalism industry is positive in theory, critics argue a more targeted approach to support local journalism would be more beneficial.
“The JCPA will not save local journalism. Instead, it will make a few billionaires even wealthier at the expense of a healthy and open internet and information environment for all of us,” Macpherson added.
The Road Ahead
The decline of local journalism and the rise of media consolidation pose significant threats to American democracy and civic engagement. Antitrust enforcement has often prioritized consumer prices over critical non-price factors, such as content diversity, quality, and the democratic role of local journalism. This narrow focus has allowed conglomerates to homogenize content and reduce local coverage, leaving communities uninformed and underrepresented, and expand ever further.
The Federal Trade Commission Chair under former President Biden, Lina Khan, recognized how unchecked media consolidation has an “outsized power on how information is distributed in our country,” affecting, in her words, “the lifeblood of our democracy.” Now, entering President Trump’s second term means another four years of more lenient antitrust enforcement, potentially furthering the media’s consolidation and jeopardizing American democracy.
Photo from The U.S. National Archives, licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal.