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Broadcast television is dying. Trump is threatening him anyway

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Broadcast television is dying. Trump is threatening him anyway

The belt-tightening has already affected another big money maker for network television: the morning show. In early January, Hoda Kotb left the Today show after 17 years. The broadcast journalist reportedly earned more than $20 million a year as an anchor, and NBC simply didn’t want to keep paying that. That’s also why the network eliminated the band. Late Night with Seth Meyers and reduced the number of weekly episodes of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon from five to four. They are all signs of what Variety called “TV’s new austerity push.”

“We have audiences that go to different places to watch their programming.” an agent told Variety. “Several of these entities are seeing their income decrease. “That’s just a fact of life.”

But now that the broadcast television audience is divided between streaming, cable and social networks, why is Donald Trump threatening its existence? “This is a political cudgel being used against national news networks,” says David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Greene noted that Trump’s ire was focused more on the national media outlets than on the local stations that actually own the broadcast licenses.

Some networks have local stations. Paramount, which also produces the CBS series 60 minutesowns a handful and was even exploring I am selling 12 of them in August before Trump launched his latest threats towards the network. But when I asked Oberman about those threats, he said he “hadn’t really heard that it was an area of ​​concern” for the industry. “If anything, the incoming administration is more favorable to broadcasters.”

Perry Sook, chief executive of Nexstar, the largest owner of television stations in the United States, is hopeful that the new administration will eliminate rules that limit the number of local stations a company can own. In a call for results from November 2024Sook clearly stated what type of journalism he would like to see on those stations. “(It seems) that a kinder, gentler consensus may be emerging, that perhaps fact-based journalism will come back into fashion, as well as eliminating the level of activist journalism that exists,” he said on the call.

Sinclair, the second-largest owner of television stations in the United States, is also eager for more consolidation and has earned a reputation for guiding its local stations to cover the news with a point of view more in line with Sinclair’s own conservative political leanings. Sinclair was the subject of a viral video 2018 which showed dozens of news anchors from across the United States reading the exact same script criticizing media outlets that repeated common conservative talking points.

But the Trump administration and big broadcast license holders aren’t friendly just because of their shared political leanings. According to Orman, local stations also tend to have better reach when it comes to political advertising. “Digital doesn’t seem to give political advertisers the performance they expect, and television still seems to deliver,” Orman he told Ad Exchanger late last year. In fact, broadcast television advertising revenue increased 9 percent in 2024, a rebound due entirely to increased spending on political advertising during the important election cycle.

With the election in the rearview, that advertising money is drying up. And with viewership declining and streaming outspending the networks, one of the world’s oldest media institutions has its back against the wall. Even if the incoming administration fails to make good on its promise to punish media outlets that publish stories it deems offensive, broadcast television is entering a period of existential uncertainty.

“Broadcasting is so vulnerable right now,” says the EFF’s Greene, “any threat to it seems like a danger.”

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