Ari Emanuel lets his AI alter ego open Endeavors earnings call, WGA chief negotiator David Young replaced due to illness ahead of key talks with studios, Before and after photos from space show storms effect on California reservoirs, Before and after photos from space show epic snow blanketing SoCal mountains, The chance of a lifetime: Five friends ski the tallest mountain in Los Angeles, A $150,000 executive protection dog? Then, late last year, Nexstar finalized an acquisition of Tribune Media for $7.2 billion, a figure that includes the assumption of Tribunes debt. The station has covered such stories, like the FBIs 2019 investigation of corruption in the administration of New Haven mayor Toni Harp, when they first surfaced in other outlets. Armed with a team of national reporters and backed by over 100 local newsrooms spread out across the country, Nexstar promised quality broadcast journalism free from opinion or bias, setting aside three hours on its only cable news channel WGN America for NewsNation. It was a huge undertaking for her, said another former WGN colleague of Lyons who was not authorized to speak publicly. But as conservative activists gather in suburban . This spring, viewership soared while earnings plummeted. Ad-Free Sign up What the FCC proceedings showed without a doubt, however, were the hard limits of a media conglomerates ability to truly serve the public interest. Last year, CNBC hired former Fox News anchor Shepard Smith for a nightly just-the-facts presentation at 7 p.m. Eastern. This story is well sourced to local sources of information as well as KTLA TV video. Overall, we rate KTLA Least Biased based on neutral straight news reporting without offering opinion pieces. In a dissenting opinion, Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel called the new policy bureaucratic and cruel. She wrote, It perversely means that the public will have fewer opportunities to comment on the use of the public airwaves.. Despite strong-arming traditional pay TV companies and forging new agreements with streaming services, Nexstar has yet to see a return on that investment even after it reduced NewsNations news hours from three to two and launched two new current affairs programs in their place. ad fontes media Most Extreme Left Hyper-Partisan Left Comm The local television behemoth Nexstar Media Group announced Friday that it had acquired The Hill, a Beltway political news website, for $130 million. Susan Tully, Nexstars senior vice president of local content development, explains, Now we own a station in market 2 [in Los Angeles] and a station in market 195 [in San Angelo, Texas]. But they were also discussed as recently as last week on NewsNation. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/business/the-hill-sale-nexstar-media.html. TODD BENSMAN (CIS SENIOR NATIONAL SECURITY FELLOW): You have just an open border. Revenue is generated through advertising. Launched on 9/1/2020, NewsNation Now was a nightly 3-hour-long news program broadcast on WGN America. Nexstars enormous reach across the country makes it a unique bellwether of whether consolidation can be in the public interest. The vast majority of local TV stations nationwide are now owned by one of those big broadcasters. Launched last year, NewsNation was billed as an attempt to bring a straightforward, no-nonsense prime-time national news block at a time when political opinion and debates dominated cable news. CIS and other Tanton-affiliated groups have been pushing bigoted anti-immigration claims and conspiracy theories for decades -- and yet one of the largest broadcast news companies in the country is still citing them in reports on immigration policy as if they are providing good-faith expertise. Media Type: TV Station Mr. Finkelstein, the heir to a New York real estate fortune and a longtime associate of former President Donald J. Trump, said that he had purchased control of The Hill in 2014, when it was primarily a print publication that covered Congress, at a fraction of the valuation he sold for. It is best known for fast aggregation and a steady stream of links from The Drudge Report. Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit OpenSecrets. Pew has basically taken the average viewer/consumer of all of these media outlets and plotted them on a continuum, trying to ascertain which outlets are favored bywhich side of the political spectrum. Under Nexstar. The Latest Fact Checks curated by Media Bias Fact Check 03/01/2023, Daily Source Bias Check: Lozier Institute, The Latest Fact Checks curated by Media Bias Fact Check 02/28/2023, Daily Source Bias Check: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, The Latest Fact Checks curated by Media Bias Fact Check 02/27/2023. Nexstar executives cited consumer research showing viewers were looking for nonpartisan news coverage. Its channel position on cable and satellite systems is typically in the triple digits and not adjacent to other news networks, making it hard for viewers to find. 02/28/23 6:43 PM EST, Article Nicole Warren, the assistant news director, told me the team ask themselves questions like, How do we give a mother everything she needs to know before she gets out the door? For major stories, they do breaking news. The program pulled only 236,000 viewers in April, despite having a highly recognizable anchor. about fifteen years ago, a handful of companies including Nexstar, Sinclair, Tegna, and Gray Television competed to buy up independent stations and media companies. Notably, he was a proponent of the family separation policy under the Trump administration. As of 2019, KTLA is owned by Nexstar Media Group, which owns over 200 TV stations nationwide. On July 26th, 2022, NewsNation announced that former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo would join the network with a new prime-time show. But his employment, which began in June and was not revealed to staff for six months, was disturbing, especially to some of the female staffers. A Fox News survey showing former President Trump leading Florida Gov. WGN America is set for a r There is no space for news headlines in prime time, said one Nexstar news veteran. However, in 2020 they . On Sunday mornings, the station airs. As of June, amid major layoffs across the media industry, the two companies hadnt reported furloughing or laying off any employees. The founder, chairman, president, and CEO of Nexstar is Perry A. Sook. O'Reilly was forced out over sexual harassment allegations, as was Shines boss Roger Ailes in 2016. WTNH staff described problems long familiar to local journalists across the country: too few reporters and too-quick turnarounds. Copyright 2013-2023 Solano Media, LLC. Donlon does not have an ideological bent on air and presents conservative and liberal guests. Some of our partners may process your data as a part of their legitimate business interest without asking for consent. On April 19, the company announced the signing of Adrienne Bankert, a former national correspondent for ABC News. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. However, Lyons'. Carlson, Fox's wildly popular conservative pundit, said last week that he would begin airing footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot this week, after Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) offered him what Carlson described as "unfettered" exclusive access to more than 40,000 hours of unreleased surveillance tape starting earlier in the month. Former state Supreme Court Judge Dan Kelly, a conservative candidate, is projected to advance to the April 4 general election in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, where he will face liberal judge . Conservative justices stress price tag of debt relief. In 2018, a high-stakes midterm year, political advertising accounted for roughly, 19 percent of Nexstars total $1.3 billion in ad revenue. When I asked about accountability reporting, Rich Graziano, the general manager, told me that investigating government institutions is not his main priority for WTNH. Retransmission fees now account for roughly half of Nexstars total revenueand the majority of these agreements are locked down until 2022, so this revenue is expected to remain steady or even increase. 20005. AccordingtoOpen Secrets, Nexstar Media group gave more money to Republicans in the 2018 election cycle (45% to Democrats, 55% to Republicans); however, in 2020, they gave more to Democrats. They cover community events. Sanchez and Resendiz are able to execute their stories because of their investigative skills and due to an ingrained conception of themselves as accountability journalists. Dont miss reporting and analysis from the Hill and the White House. Nexstar, a public company, became the nation's largest local TV operator in 2018, when it bought Tribune Media, the television arm of the Tribune Company, for $4.1 billion. Despite its branding emphasis on local news, Nexstars banner projects are designed to share state and national stories with regional audiences. Whats more, over the last three months, several of NewsNations top editorial executives including the newsrooms leader, Jennifer Lyons, a veteran news director from Nexstars Chicago station, WGN have exited. During the 2020 presidential campaign, a columnist for the publication, John Solomon, played a central role in Rudy Giulianis efforts to link Joseph R. Biden to corruption in Ukraine, prompting an internal investigation by The Hill. The network also hired Ashleigh Banfield, a veteran of CNN and MSNBC, to host a nightly newsmaker interview program at 10 p.m. Eastern. But the constant pressure to deliver content keeps producers and reporters in a daily churn that does not allow them time for longer or more complicated projectsthe kind of quality coverage that benefits the public. And whats happening? To request permission for commercial use, please contactus. Is a national conglomerate the future of local news? Political spending at Tribune peaked around 2000 when they gave $123,280, the majority of that to Republicans. The accounts of those in the political center will have networks that look similar, while the more liberal accounts will have progressively less in common with the more conservative ones. Nexstar Chairman Perry Sook told staff during a newsroom visit in March that talk programming was always part of the plan for NewsNation. That, more than anything else, is a testament to Fox's domination on the political right and American conservatives' distrust of other mainstream media outlets. Even Sinclair Broadcast Group, which had run into criticism for a conservative bent in local newscast commentary, is launching what it calls a fact-based morning headline news service early next year. Ron DeSantis by 15 points among Republican presidential primary voters is the latest cause for heartburn among Senate . John Thune, Marsha Blackburn, Amy Klobuchar, and Ted Cruz, sit on the Senate subcommittee tasked with overseeing the FCC. Yet on February 16, one syndicated Nexstar piece aired an interview with a representative of CIS with no reference to the organizations extremist views. 3) The broadcast stations (NBC, CBS, ABC) and online news sites like Yahoo and Google have a more middle-of-the-road audience than other mainstream media outlets. There's some evidence to suggest that The Hill's former owner Jeremey Finkelstein is friends with former President Trump and has interfered with the site's output. CHICAGO ( NewsNation Now) NewsNation is ranked as both neutral and most reliable in the January 2021 edition of the Media Bias Chart from Ad Fontes Media, nearly five months after launching live on-air and online nationwide. We will see Nexstars dual purposesserving the public and expanding to maximize profitscontinue to be at odds. It seemed like fertile ground for the Irving, Texas-based Nexstar Media Group, the countrys largest owner of TV stations, including Los Angeles outlet KTLA. After Nexstar acquired WTNH in New Haven, Connecticut, in 2017, as part of its acquisition of Media General, the news team was encouraged to lead every newscast with a local story. Local TV stations tend to have a glut of crime stories, ranging from the horrific to the mundane, because a steady stream of them are always arriving through the police blotter. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact-check record. But the news director and managing editor of its prime-time news block, also called NewsNation, resigned soon after it was revealed that Bill Shine, the former Fox News co-president, had come aboard as an adviser. And regardless of how much an individual station manager personally values accountability reporting, in the end that manager is tasked with keeping the station profitable, which means running more hours of news programming with a lean staff, making it much more difficult for a reporter to spend two months setting up a necessary interview with a government official. NewsNation still runs entertainment programming during the day, likely adding to consumer confusion. His coverage of the television industry has appeared in TV Guide, the New York Daily News, the New York Times, Fortune, the Hollywood Reporter, Inside.com and Adweek. Read our profile on the United States government and media. Many believed that Trumps spreading of disinformation about the election helped fuel the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Advertising generates revenue. The deal also unites two companies that have sought, with mixed results, to present themselves as neutral arbiters in a partisan moment. Advertising generates revenue. The latest: Durbin praises Garland for restoring independence to Justice Dept. On paper, Nexstar stations reach 38 percent of American households that own a TV, just below the maximum allowed by market caps designed to prevent monopolies. Consistent with our commitment to deliver unbiased news to our viewers, NewsNation has hired a number of employees and consultants with diverse news production and reporting backgrounds from a variety of news organizations such as CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business, CBS, NBC and ABC. Fair Use Policy , in large part because the company owns stations in swing districts and states across the country. A 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, charitable organization, 1100 13th Street, NW, Suite 800 Nexstar Media Group plans to launch a nationwide primetime news show called News Nation over its WGN America cable network tomorrow, a risky move under the best of circumstances let alone. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Ad-Free Login According to Open Secrets , Nexstar Media group gave more money to Republicans in the 2018 election cycle (45% to Democrats, 55% to Republicans). In reality, Nexstar says, its stations reach 63 percent of American households, well surpassing the cap. NewsNation, previously named WGN America, had been positioned by Nexstar at its debut last year as a just-the-facts news channel. Now that the economy is in free fall, the near-monopoly status of Nexstar and Sinclair means that their stations will have a better chance of surviving. The company has cited data from Ad Fontes Media, a Colorado-based nonpartisan organization that rates the political leanings of media outlets. 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