Reusing the News: Duplicating Local TV Content

Abstract

Local U.S. television news provides citizens with crucial local information, particularly during periods of 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: (1) What is the state of ownership and/or control of local television stations across the 210 television markets in the U.S.? (2) Does that ownership/control affect news content and, if so, how?

We constructed three databases to address these questions. The databases span multiple characteristics of local broadcast stations and of the actual news content (i.e., transcript text) that 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 a three-month period in the fall of 2019. It is the largest such database in existence. We chose a period before the COVID pandemic so that coverage was not affected by a single overwhelming story. We employed automated text reuse methods to measure the extent to which 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 (text reuse).