I haven’t watched broadcast news, or broadcast anything, since the last Broncos season, when I sometimes caught a few minutes of news after a game. My little antenna shows a beautiful picture, but, except for live sports, I just can’t get past the idea of having to watch something exactly the moment it broadcasts. That requirement is just ridiculous. I want to be able to watch something when I find it convenient, and I want to be able to pause, replay, skip around, or whatever.
Apparently a lot of people share the sentiment. “For the first time, social media overtakes TV as Americans’ top news source,” Nieman Lab reports. That’s a little misleading, of course, because the news that people get on social media (as opposed to the targeted ads, conspiracy mongering, and absolute nonsense) generally comes from news outlets, including “TV” news.
I used to aggregate my news feed mostly through Twitter. But Elon Musk turned that site into a sewer, so now I get my news mostly through a combination of an RSS feed reader (I use and love Feedly), email lists, and the Complete Colorado front page. I get daily emails from Colorado Public Radio, Axios, Westword, and others, and ProgressNow puts out a surprisingly robust news email, curated from a leftist perspective.
We’ll survive the 9News sale
9News is my favorite TV news station, specifically because of Next, followed by CBS4. But “TV news” is an odd category these days. A Comscore report from a couple years ago suggests that 9News aired on maybe 80,000 television sets, so maybe double that number for viewers. Now 9News says its web site gets 3.8 million monthly visitors for a total of 25 million monthly page views. I watch and read 9News either through links to its web site or at its YouTube channel.
By contrast, the Colorado Sun related in its 2023 report that “during the 2022–23 period” it “saw more than 11.5 million unique visitors.” Divide that by twelve for a rough idea of monthly visitors. But a comparison of the raw numbers may not tell us much in terms of serious news consumption; how many people check the 9News web site just for sports or weather?
TV news viewership has fallen off a cliff. In 2018, Westword’s Michael Roberts wrote an article titled, “The Incredible Shrinking Denver TV News Audience.” Roberts wrote, “The current audience share for the 10 p.m. Monday-Friday broadcast on 9News may be Denver’s largest in the time slot yet again, but it’s about one-quarter the size it was less than twenty years ago.” So TV news is less important than it once was, and “TV” news now largely is just news, available through the same channels as everything else.
Still, obviously 9News is a serious part of Colorado’s news media landscape. It joins other TV news crews, the newspapers starting with the Denver Post and the Gazette, the CPR empire, the Sun, and various smaller outlets. These include Complete Colorado and the Chamber of Commerce’s Sum & Substance, for which Ed Sealover writes detailed and generally business-friendly reports.
And Colorado definitely would lose something if 9News were seriously diminished. Here is a recent example. On August 21, 9News published a story by Chris Vanderveen about apparent errors in parole risk assessment scores. These errors seem to have allowed a man to walk around with less supervision, during which time he murdered a man. This is an extraordinary, important, and shocking story. If Vanderveen and his team had not done this work, would anyone else have done it? Journalism matters!
At the same time, we shouldn’t assume that 9News in its current business structure is necessary for journalists now at the station to do their jobs. To point out the obvious: Any other news outlet in the state could offer to hire the 9News team or any portion of it. Indeed, if 9News’s new owner Nexstar cuts staff, as most people assume it will, I suspect some 9News journalists will end up working for other stations.
Here’s an idea: The 9News Next team could start an independent direct-to-internet news outlet, funded directly by viewers and donors, sort of along the model of the Sun. I suspect that, if these journalists announced such a move, they quickly could raise hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I don’t think this actually will happen, because running a business is hard, generating revenues is hard, meeting payroll is hard. And, bluntly, I doubt the top-paid 9News journalists would accept the likely resulting pay cut. (I asked Kyle Clark how much he gets paid through 9News but I haven’t heard back.) Nobody’s forcing anyone to work for corporate media, and if someone makes the choice to do so, let’s not pretend that they’re a victim.
A pervasive pro-political bias
Here is the healthy attitude to take regarding the sale of 9News: “Well, that sucks, but business owners have the right to run or sell their businesses as they see fit, and people who want to organize new businesses involving the affected journalists are free to do so.”
Here is the rough attitude among Colorado’s political and media elite: “Ohmygod the sky is falling this is so horrible politicians obviously ought to butt in.”
On August 22 the Colorado Sun ran an article headed, “Colorado Democrats condemn sale of 9News’ parent company to owner of Fox31.” Subtle! But Democrats are not only issuing condemnations. The Sun reports, “Attorney General Phil Weiser said Thursday he has concerns about the sale, and that his office would ‘closely review this proposed merger to determine if it will harm Coloradans.'” That is a threat of government interference.
Chase Woodruff, reporter for the leftist Newsline, said on Bluesky about the sale, “Bad on every level. Far and away the best TV newsroom in Colorado likely to get swallowed up by the worst, under a corporate parent that’s already positioned itself as News Corp Lite and will face explicit pressure to go even further in that direction to win FCC approval.”
Woodruff’s remarks do unintentionally point to a very real problem with giving politicians the power to interfere with business decisions. As CNBC reported August 21, “Two top House Democrats are investigating whether Paramount and Skydance Media acquiesced to ‘illegitimate demands’ from President Donald Trump in order to win approval for their $8 billion merger.” Wow, whoever could have predicted that letting politicians and bureaucrats decide business deals would lead to politicized outcomes?
But Weiser, brilliant legal mind that he is, cannot manage the equivalent of putting two and two together and coming up with the answer that central economic planning is wrong and inherently corruptive, so of course he wants more such central economic planning and more government interference.
I definitely would be interested in an analysis of whether federal taxes and regulations artificially drive conglomeration in media as well as in other industries. Thomas Hazlett, for example, argued that federal licensing rewarded legacy radio stations and limited competition. But any reasonable discussion revolves around how to get government influence out of media, not how to expand government influence over it. A genuinely free press requires no less.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
