Belt-tightening has already hit another big money-maker for network television: the morning show. At the beginning of January, Hoda Kotb left Today show after 17 years. The reporter was reportedly making over $20 million a year as an anchor, and NBC just didn’t want to keep paying that. This is also the reason why the network rejected the band Late Night with Seth Meyers and reduced the number of weekly episodes The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon from five to four. These are all signs of what Diversity called “TV’s new austerity effort”.
“[W]they have an audience that goes to different places to watch their program,” said one agent Diversity. “The number of these entities is recording a decrease in income. It’s just a fact of life.”
But with broadcast television audiences now divided into streaming, cable and social media, why is that Donald Trump threatens its existence? “[T]it’s a political cudgel used against national news networks,” said David Greene, director of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Greene noted that Trump’s ire was directed more at national news outlets than at local stations that actually hold broadcast licenses.
Some networks own local stations. Paramount, which also produces CBS 60 minuteshe owns a handful, and even did some research I am selling 12 of them back in August before Trump made his latest threats according to the network. But when I asked Oberman about those threats, she said she hadn’t “really heard that it was an area of concern” for the industry. “If anything, the new administration is more broadcaster-friendly.”
Perry Sook, CEO of Nexstar, the largest U.S. television station owner, hopes the new administration will remove rules that limit the number of local stations a company can own. On earnings call for November 2024Sook made it clear what kind of journalism he wanted to see on those stations. “[I]”It seems that a better, gentler consensus may emerge that maybe fact-based journalism will come back into vogue, as well as eliminate the level of activist journalism out there,” he said during the call.
Sinclair, the second-largest U.S. TV station owner, is also eager for more consolidation, and has built a reputation for steering its local stations to cover news with a POV more in line with Sinclair’s own conservative political leanings. Sinclair was subject to a Viral video from 2018 which showed dozens of news anchors from across the US reading the exact same script criticizing the media for repeating the usual conservative talking points.
But the Trump administration and the big broadcast license holders aren’t friendly just because of shared political leanings. According to Orman, local stations also have a better reach when it comes to political advertising. “[D]igital doesn’t seem to be giving political advertisers the return they expect, and TV still seems to be giving it,” Orman he told Ad Exchanger late last year. Broadcast TV actually saw a 9 percent increase in ad revenue in 2024, an uptick due entirely to increased spending on political ads during the main election cycle.
With the election in the background, that advertising money is drying up. And with viewership declining and streaming consuming more and more networks, one of the oldest media institutions in the world is leaning against the wall. Even if the new administration doesn’t follow through on its promise to punish media outlets that publish stories it finds offensive, broadcast TV is entering a period of existential uncertainty.
“Broadcasting is so vulnerable right now,” says EFF’s Greene, “any threat against it feels like a threat.”