If you’re one of the people (like me) who worry about the state of local news in Denver and in Colorado, I hate to tell you this, but it looks like it’s going to get worse.
Much worse.
Maybe incalculably worse.
Because there’s a significant chance that 9News — Denver’s longtime local TV ratings leader and, more importantly, its longtime local TV journalism leader — may not be the 9News you know and love for much longer.
Not to get overly dramatic about it, but the Westword story on 9News asked if the station is about to be “relegated to the bins of history.” I prefer “ash heap” myself, but you get the gist either way.
It’s not that 9News is losing money. It’s not.
And it’s not that viewers are suddenly rejecting the product after all these years. They’re not, although many cord cutters, we’re told, no longer bother with TV news at all.
And it’s certainly not that Kyle Clark doesn’t still have the coolest, most innovative, most risk-taking local news broadcast around. He does. For now, anyway. I assume he’ll keep doing it somewhere, but who knows?
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What’s happening to 9News is that local-TV giant, Nexstar Media Group, is buying the fourth-largest local TV chain, Tegna, for $6.2 billion. And this consolidation — Nexstar owns KDVR (Fox31); Tegna owns 9News — could land on 9News like one of Donald Trump’s beloved bunker busters.
Nexstar is known as “Death Star” to its critics in the business, a company infamous for cutting costs and cutting investigative journalism and laying off hard-working journalists. I’m sure journalists at 9News are busy writing resumes or maybe looking for a job with a little more stability. Are there still jobs like that? Don’t tell it to civil service workers.
If you want an idea of how badly it could turn out, check the 9News website. The story of the sale was written not by a 9News journalist. Not by the Associated Press. The article, it turns out, is a Tegna news release.
This transaction may remind you of The Denver Post’s devastating sale to the vulture capitalists at Alden Global Capital. There’s a documentary about it called “Stripped for Parts.” Or, for that matter, you could just pick up the undersized and undernourished edition of the newspaper any day to see the damage that has been wrought.
Clark wasn’t immediately commenting on the proposed sale, which Trump’s FCC will no doubt approve and applaud, regulations be damned or just ignored, but Clark got out in front of the consolidation news last week in social media posts celebrating his 18th anniversary at 9News.
But Clark wasn’t actually talking about anniversaries. He definitely wasn’t celebrating. The piece reads more like a farewell note.
“Journalism is a business full of people with strong convictions,” Clark wrote. “But I think employees in most industries will ultimately share their employer’s values, by choice or by dictate, for better or for worse. I am beyond grateful to have spent the last 18 years working for and with people whose values I admire: speaking truth to power, respecting the intelligence of our community, and understanding that integrity cannot be repurchased once it’s sold.”
Let’s take the last line. Understanding that integrity cannot be repurchased once it’s sold. You can cut it out — I guess you have to print it first — and put it on your refrigerator.
And it’s no accident that Clark used the word “sold.” He could have gone further and said “sold out,” but these decisions don’t happen in the rooms where Clark and the other journalists work.
It happens in the offices on Wall Street and the Washington office of FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, another of Trump’s appointees who moves longtime, public-serving regulations into, yes, the ash heap of history.
At last count, nearly 100 FCC regulations have been discarded as obsolete. And the people who run both Nexstar and Tegna thanked Trump’s leadership for ridding troublesome rules that might have stood in the way of this gigantic transaction.
One regulation that seems to be old news is the FCC’s “top four” rule, which says that no company can own more than one of the top four stations in any market. A federal appeals court has turned away those who were challenging the FCC’s decision to loosen that rule. So it’s no problem if 9News and Fox31 are owned by the same people. Unless one of them goes away. Or is stripped for more parts.
And so we come to a place where Nexstar and its partners will, if the deal goes through as expected, run 265 TV stations in 44 states and D.C., assuming the National Guard doesn’t take over the one in Washington. It owns 201 stations now — Tegna still has the other 64 — and the 201, according to Nexstar, reach nearly 40% of TV households.
You think that’s a good thing? Me neither.
You think more mergers are coming? Me too. Heck, we just had a media consolidation that cost us Stephen Colbert. Not even the loss of Kyle Clark, a pretty funny guy himself, would hurt that much.
And it gets worse. According to the New York Times, the companies overlap in 35 TV markets. Just guessing, but approximately none of those markets will be as competitive when the sale goes through as they are today.
9News is the largest news operation in Colorado. Its newsroom is probably double that of the Denver Post’s. I worked at the Post when it had the state’s largest newsroom. Then it was bought by Alden. I still take that bit of business personally, and not just because it was under the Alden regime that I was laid off for the only time in my 50-plus years in the business.
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It’s more than personal, even to the journalists who may lose their jobs. I did a panel discussion recently on disinformation and misinformation and how a reader or viewer might discern whether the news they’re getting is accurate and trustworthy. I cited 9News as one outlet that can be trusted. (I also mentioned The Sun, of course.)
It’s getting harder every day to know what is true, particularly since our president is the master of dis- and misinformation. And because AI can produce news and photos that look real, but definitely are not. So can Russian bots. And because the partisan wars in our country make it all too easy to convince people on one side that the news people get on the other side is fake.
I hope the news about the likely fate of 9News turns out to be overblown. That the newsroom doesn’t get eviscerated. That Clark and others at the station turn out to be valued. That Nexstar could look at the bottom line and see that good journalism can be not only important but even, if only occasionally, financially rewarding.
But experience tells a different story — and one, sadly, that reads like truth.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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