Different channel, same news

Local television news is a lifeline for millions of Americans, delivering information that can directly impact daily life, from weather alerts to election coverage to emergency updates.

But a new University of Delaware study reveals a surprising trend: In many markets, "local" TV news might be exactly the same as what's airing on another channel in town.

Researchers Danilo Yanich and Benjamin E. Bagozzi analyzed three months of local TV news broadcasts from 861 stations nationwide - more than 400,000 programs in all. Using a high bar for what counts as duplication (at least half of the content being word-for-word identical, excluding sports, weather and ads), they found widespread story sharing.

Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the SNF Ithaca Initiative team, the team discovered that 39% of U.S. TV markets had duplicating station pairs, reaching over a third of American TV households. Smaller markets were more likely to have these overlaps. In some cases, two stations in the same city aired nearly identical newscasts night after night.

The duplication usually happened within the same geographic market (86% of cases) rather than between different regions. On average, these station pairs had identical content 65% of the time.

"In any other context, this would be plagiarism," said Yanich, noting that he and Bagozzi intentionally examined stations over 91 days to cover a body of content large enough to provide meaningful results.

The result? A pattern of duplication stemming from business arrangements between stations. The most common are service agreements, where one television station produces news for another, often sharing studios and staff. Service-agreement-linked stations had duplication rates twice as high as stations that were simply co-owned. Other arrangements include duopolies (when one company owns two stations in the same market) and common ownership of stations in different markets.

For Yanich, the finding isn't especially surprising.

"These are profit-seeking entities," he said of the media conglomerates. "You enhance profits through economies of scale, and when you only bear the cost of production once, you can present the same story over and over again."

Four major station groups - Nexstar, Gray, News-Press and Gazette, and Sinclair - controlled more than half of all duplicating station pairs. Nexstar alone was responsible for 22% of them.

Yet local TV remains America's most trusted news source. Over three-quarters of Americans say they trust it more than newspapers, radio or online news. And while national cable networks attract significant attention, their audiences are often smaller than the combined reach of local broadcasts.

The study's authors stress that while consolidation may make financial sense for station owners, it raises important questions about the future of local journalism. If more and more markets see their "local" stations airing the same news, communities may lose the independent voices that help keep citizens informed and hold local leaders accountable.

As a result, the general public must confront an information ecosystem increasingly misaligned with their needs.

"There is no magic action to override this media landscape," said Yanich. "Citizenship is hard, and it's getting harder. But like I tell my students, 'When someone says, This happened, your first question should be, How do you know? How do you know it happened? If the answers meet your standard of logic and understanding, then take it. But understanding takes work."