Local TV news operations across America got hammered Wednesday by a media reform group based in Washington, DC. “Across the country, hundreds of TV stations have quietly merged newsrooms, circumventing the Federal Communications Commission’s media ownership limits at the expense of independent, local journalism,” charged SavetheNews.org.
Chicago was singled out. The basis of the SavetheNews.org case against this city’s TV operations is a 2009 column describing, if not merged newsrooms then pooled resources, one justification being that this would free up camera crews to do more enterprise journalism. There’s been precious little evidence of that. Evidence of layoffs and diminished journalism is easier to find.