FCC Media Study 4: News Operations

The relationship between broadcast TV stations’ ownership characteristics and the quantity of news and public affairs programming they provided is examined, based on the scheduled programming of almost all full power broadcast TV stations for two weeks a year for the four-year period 2002 to 2005. Using a three-way group fixed effects model to control for unobserved market-specific, broadcast network-specific, and time-specific factors, we found TV stations provided more news programming if they were cross-owned with a newspaper (18 minutes per day, an 11% increase), owned by a big four network (22 minutes more, a 13% increase), and had co-owned TV stations in the same market (24 minutes per day more per co-owned station, a 15% increase). They provided less news programming if they were part of a large station group, or if they were locally owned (6 minutes less per day, a 4% decrease). TV-radio cross-ownership did not have a statistically-significant impact on news programming. Most ownership characteristics did not have a statistically significant impact on the quantity of public affairs programming, however, with the exception that TVradio cross-ownership was associated with 3 minutes more per day (15% increase).