Recent decades have seen major changes to the local media environment in the United States, with the absorption of many formerly independent local TV stations into conglomerates. Using a comprehensive dataset of acquisitions, we examine the effects of ownership by the three largest television...

Every day, editors of media outlets decide what is news and what is not. In this paper, we unpack the process of news production by looking at the share of newscasts devoted to weather events — deviations in temperatures from the historical mean — by local TV stations in the United States....