Media consolidation and interlocking directorships are the reasons.

If you want to know why Big Media on the left and right is so unoriginal and shallow, a couple of left-leaning sources have the answer.

The sources also explain why the residents of most cities and towns across the country no longer have locally-owned news outlets and thus have to rely on media conglomerates headquartered elsewhere. In-depth investigative reporting on local issues is not in their corporate DNA.

My adopted hometown of Tucson is an example. In a metro area of nearly 1.1 million people, Tucson’s major newspaper, the Daily Star, is owned by out-of-state Lee Enterprises (which will be covered more extensively later in this commentary).

It was the same when I lived in Phoenix and had a column in the Arizona Republic, which is owned by Gannett. And when I had a Texas newspaper as a client of my strategic planning consulting business, the most pressing strategic issue facing the 100-year-old family-owned newspaper was whether it could survive without selling to an out-of-state conglomerate.

There are two reasons for these negative developments: media consolidation and interlocking directorships. 

A lengthy article on these developments can be found at the following link. Click here to open the link.

Excerpts:

. . . whereas 50 companies dominated the media landscape in 1983, that dwindled to nine companies by the 1990s. It got worse from there.

Today, just six conglomerates — Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Sony, Fox, and Paramount Global (formerly known as ViacomCBS) — control 90% of what you watch, read, or listen to. To put this into perspective: that means about 232 media executives have the power to decide what information 277 million Americans are able to access. In 2021, the “big six” banked a total of more than $478 billion in revenue. That’s more than both Finland’s and Ukraine’s GDP combined.

The issue extends to print media and radio giants, too: iHeartMedia owns 863 radio stations nationwide, while Gannett owns more than 100 daily U.S. newspapers and nearly 1,000 weeklies.

As the pool controlling the media keeps shrinking, so does the breadth of the information reported. Hence why today’s thousands of news outlets often churn out embarrassingly duplicative content.

Nowadays, there are entire cities and towns across the country with no local coverage. According to a 2018 study, more than 2,000 U.S. counties (63.6%) have no daily newspaper, while 1,449 counties (46%) only have one. Meanwhile, 171 counties — totaling 3.2 million residents — have zero newspapers whatsoever.

But this consolidation of power extends beyond just monopolies and mergers galore — compounding the issue are shared board members. All media corporations have a board of directors, which is responsible for making decisions that support the interests of stakeholders.

When someone sits on the board at multiple companies, that creates an “interlock.” Scroll through The New York Times board of directors, for example, and you’ll find a certain member is also on the board for McDonald’s and Nike and is chairman of Ariel Investments. Up until last year, a Disney chairwoman happened to be on the board for private equity giant The Carlyle Group.

A 2021 study published in Mass Communication & Society (MCS) revealed that publicly traded American newspaper companies were interlocked by 1,276 connections to 530 organizations. The data showed that about 36% of these connections were to other media organizations, 20% to advertisers, 16% to financial institutions, 12% to tech firms, and 2% to government and political entities.

More specifically, a 2012 list compiled by FAIR revealed the following interlocks:

CBS/Viacom: Amazon, Pfizer, CVS, Dell, Cardinal Health, and Verizon

Fox/News Corp: Rothschild Investment Corporation, Phillip Morris, British Airways, and New York Stock Exchange

ABC/Disney: Boeing, City National Bank, FedEx, and HCA Healthcare

NBC: Anheuser-Busch, Morgan Chase & Co., Coca-Cola, and Chase Manhattan

CNN/TimeWarner: Citigroup, American Express, Fannie Mae, Colgate-Palmolive, Hilton Hotels, PepsiCo, Sears, and Pfizer

The New York Times Co: Johnson & Johnson, Ford, Texaco, Alcoa, Avon, Campbell Soup, Metropolitan Life, and Starwood Hotels & Resorts

The 2012 FAIR report mentioned above can be found at the following link. No doubt, the directorships have changed since then.

The aforementioned 2021 academic study examined whether interlocking directorships have an influence on news coverage and determined that they do. A link to the study and the study’s abstract are pasted at the end of this commentary.  The abstract mentions Lee Enterprises.

My final thought is that the study misses a larger point.  As I know from a lot of personal experience, the boards of directors of America’s largest companies tend to think alike, see the world alike, and look alike, regardless of their race or gender. Most directors are cut out of the same mold and interchangeable unless they were founding entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk. If you doubt that, pull up the websites of the biggest companies in America and read the platitudes, banalities, and blather about race, gender, community, the environment, and other subjects du jour. They all sound the same. When a CEO of one of the companies joins the board of another company, the executive has basically gone from one echo chamber to another. Such uniformity is bad enough in the industry but particularly harmful to a free press.

Anyway, here’s the link and abstract for the study:

Today’s media companies seem to be more intertwined than ever. But are they? Do these “interlocks” affect editors and the content journalists produce? This study uses a three-method design to examine the connections among newspaper organizations and corporations. The network analysis examined the interlocks among news-paper companies’ directors. The second phase surveyed editors of newspapers owned by these companies to assess the influence on the newsroom from the board and parent company. In the third phase, news coverage of directors and their affiliated organizations was con-tent analyzed for newspapers whose editors perceived pressure “from above.” The network analysis results suggest a monolithic interlocking structure that previous scholars feared. For one-third of survey respondents, corporate parents and the boardroom were seen as influencing the newsroom. These “pressured editors” perceived significantly stronger pressures from the boardroom, “ownership/upper management,” and business interests than editors who did not indicate pressure from above. So, how did pressured newsrooms cover ownership and directors? Routine coverage of directors and their affiliated organizations was lacking. Disclosure of a relationship between a director or affiliated organization and the newspaper was disclosed half of the time and traditional journalistic scrutiny was applied less than half of the time.

Lee Enterprises, for instance, had 20 directors connected via their membership on other boards or work histories to 196 other organizations such as the Associated Press (AP). The AP, unlike Lee Enterprises which was on the seed list of media and parent companies, was connected to 12 organizations. As Figure 1illustrates, directors on the AP’s board were also on the board (solid line) of New Media Investment Group, The New York Times, and News Corp, and some directors had employment ties (dashed line) to Lee Enterprises. Organizations with more connections are more central in the interlock network. Connections among the organizations created a network with four distinct components. The main component included 430 organizations such as Lee Enterprises, Tronc/Tribune, The McClatchy Company, News Corp, and The New York Times. This component illustrates news media organizations’ reach to others and the concentration of ties among media organizations. The three other distinct components were isolated from the main component and centered around Digital First Media, hedge fund Alden Global Capital, and Civitas Media, respectively. Alden’s predatory business“ strategy” for its news organization investments is notorious in professional journalism (Doctor, 2019; Pickard, 2020). RQ2 directed attention to the composition.