Conservative Media’s Big Advantage: Money, Money, Money

But perhaps the most important aspect of today’s media landscape comes down to money. More precisely, the endless river of oligarchic monopoly money.

Well-functioning media systems usually have some sort of constraint or public oversight that prevents journalism from straying too far from its core mission of informing the public. This public participation may take the form of regulation (through broadcast licensing, for example), support for large public broadcasting companies (the BBC in the United Kingdom, the CBC in Canada), or various other mechanisms (such as the old fairness doctrine in the United States).

In the United States, public constraint on the media has largely disappeared. But this does not mean that the system has been delivered to the “market”. Today, for example, 40 percent of all local television news channels are under the control of the three largest broadcast conglomerates: Sinclair Broadcast Group, Gray Television and Nexstar Media Group. Their stations – each company now has around a hundred affiliated with ABC, CBS, FOX or NBC – are present in more than 80% of American media markets. A conglomerate with a distinct and well-documented right-wing bias, like Sinclair, has an outsized footprint on our information ecosystem.