Any serious discussion of media reform requires first identifying who the current system serves. The collapse of local news — the closure of more than a quarter of American newspapers over the past fifteen years, the hollowing out of broadcast newsrooms, the disappearance of the advertising revenue that once sustained independent local journalism — is typically framed as a market failure, an act of creative destruction brought on by the internet. That framing is incomplete. Markets produce winners and losers, and the winners in the current media environment have, in many cases, taken active steps to preserve the conditions that benefit them. Understanding who those actors are, what they have done, and what their documented positions show is not an exercise in assigning blame. It is a precondition for any realistic analysis of what reform would require.
Hedge Fund Ownership: The Alden Global Capital Model
Alden Global Capital is the second-largest newspaper owner in the United States by circulation. The firm controls more than 200 newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and the New York Daily News — properties it acquired through its 2021 takeover of Tribune Publishing, a transaction that was financed in part with help from Cerberus. Alden had been accumulating newspapers since the tail end of the Great Recession, roughly 2009, and by the time it moved on Tribune Publishing it had already developed a well-documented operating model.
That model, as described in detail by The Atlantic, follows a consistent pattern: reduce staff, sell real estate holdings, raise subscription prices, and extract cash from the operation until it either folds or survives as a diminished version of itself. University of North Carolina researchers found that Alden-owned newspapers cut staff at twice the rate of competitors. A NewsGuild analysis documented staff reductions of 36 percent across Alden’s newspaper holdings between 2015 and 2017 alone. The Chicago Tribune lost a quarter of its newsroom within days of the Tribune Publishing acquisition closing, through a round of buyouts.
The more distinctive aspect of Alden’s operation is where those extracted profits went. Legal filings cited by The Atlantic document that the firm diverted hundreds of millions of dollars from its newspapers into other ventures: risky bets on commercial real estate, a bankrupt pharmacy chain, and Greek debt bonds. Alden is not, in other words, a newspaper company that manages its assets aggressively. It is a hedge fund that happens to own newspapers and uses them as cash-generating vehicles for unrelated financial speculation.
This distinction matters for understanding what the firm’s interests are. A hedge fund that treats newspapers as extraction vehicles has an incentive to maximize short-term cash flows and operate at profit for as long as the assets remain viable — not to sustain journalism. Alden has operated with minimal public transparency, rarely engaging with regulators or the press. Its influence on the newspaper industry is exerted not through advocacy but through ownership, and the model it has pioneered has spread. A Financial Times analysis found that roughly half of all daily newspapers in the United States are now controlled by financial firms.
The consequence of this ownership structure is not simply fewer journalists. It is the systematic elimination of the institutional capacity to cover local government, local courts, local school boards, and local business. The communities that have lost local news coverage are not evenly distributed. They tend to be smaller cities and mid-sized markets where a single paper held a near-monopoly on accountability journalism. When that paper is acquired by a firm whose interest is in extracting value rather than producing it, the journalism tends to disappear before the paper itself does.
Broadcast Consolidation: Nexstar, Sinclair, and the FCC
While hedge funds have reshaped the newspaper industry, a parallel consolidation has proceeded in local television broadcasting, where two companies — Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group — have pursued aggressive expansion strategies and an equally aggressive lobbying campaign to remove the regulatory limits that constrain their growth.
Nexstar is currently the largest television station owner in the United States. In August 2025, the company announced plans to acquire TEGNA, a rival broadcaster, in a deal valued at approximately $6.2 billion. If completed, the merger would give Nexstar control of 265 full-power television stations across 44 states and the District of Columbia, reaching more than 80 percent of U.S. television households — more than twice the 39 percent national ownership cap that Congress established in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2004. A coalition including Free Press, the Communications Workers of America, United Church of Christ Media Justice Ministry, and Public Knowledge subsequently filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, challenging the FCC’s approval of the merger as unlawful and seeking a stay before it becomes irreversible.
The lobbying campaign that preceded and accompanied the merger application is extensive and documented. According to OpenSecrets, Nexstar spent $3.2 million lobbying the FCC in 2025 — roughly ten times its annual lobbying expenditures during the period from 2018 to 2023. TEGNA, which had not previously engaged in federal lobbying, invested $550,000 in 2025 through Miller Strategies, a firm led by Jeff Miller, who previously served as finance chair for President Trump’s second inaugural committee. Together, Nexstar and TEGNA paid Miller Strategies more than a million dollars in connection with the prospective merger, as reported by The Wrap.
Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns, operates, or provides services to 178 television stations across 81 markets, has pursued a parallel strategy. The company quadrupled its federal lobbying expenditures in 2024 compared to the prior year, and invested $800,000 in FCC lobbying in 2025, focused on media ownership and communications regulations. Sinclair has also conducted a strategic review of potential mergers and acquisitions, including a disclosed acquisition of a stake in E.W. Scripps and a subsequent takeover proposal that Scripps rebuffed through a poison pill provision, according to The Wrap.
The central regulatory target of both companies’ lobbying is the 39 percent national ownership cap. Under current rules, the cap is calculated with a UHF discount that effectively counts certain stations as serving fewer households than they do. Without that discount applied, Nexstar already reaches approximately 70 percent of U.S. television households. The lobbying campaign has focused on persuading the FCC — and, secondarily, Congress — to eliminate or significantly raise the cap. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has publicly expressed support for the Nexstar-TEGNA deal, and The Wrap reported that he referenced issuing a waiver in response to press inquiries. Critics, including the legal team representing the coalition challenge, argue that the FCC lacks authority to waive a cap established by Congress and that doing so would require congressional action.
What the broadcast consolidation push means for local news coverage is not a hypothetical. Station groups that own multiple outlets in a single market have a documented tendency to centralize production, share content across stations, and reduce locally produced newscasts. Merged station groups can achieve the cost synergies their investors require precisely by eliminating the redundant local reporting capacity that distinguishes local news from national programming repackaged at the local level.
Platform Advertising Concentration: Google and Meta
The third structural force shaping the current media environment is the concentration of digital advertising revenue in two platforms: Google and Meta. This concentration did not result from any single regulatory decision or corporate acquisition. It accumulated over roughly two decades as search advertising and social media advertising became the dominant vehicles for commercial messaging — and as newspapers and local broadcasters proved unable to replicate or compete with the targeting capabilities and scale those platforms offered advertisers.
The current scale of that concentration is substantial. According to projections from eMarketer cited by Digital IT News, Meta is projected to reach $243 billion in net worldwide advertising revenue in 2026, with Google projected at approximately $239 billion. Together, the two companies account for roughly 53 percent of global digital advertising spending. Meta’s global advertising share reached 26.8 percent in 2026 projections, overtaking Google’s 26.4 percent for the first time. When Amazon is added to the calculation, the three largest digital advertising platforms are projected to represent 62.3 percent of total worldwide digital ad spending in 2026.
The mechanism by which this concentration damaged local news economics is well documented. Local newspapers historically derived the majority of their revenue not from subscriptions but from advertising: classified listings, display ads from local retailers, employment ads, legal notices. Digital platforms did not simply compete for a share of those advertising dollars — they restructured the market entirely. Classified advertising migrated to platforms like Craigslist; display and search advertising shifted to Google and Facebook, which offered measurable targeting and national reach at lower cost per impression than local papers could match.
What local newspapers once earned from advertising has not been replaced by subscriptions, grants, or alternative revenue models at anything close to the necessary scale. The platforms that now collect that revenue have not developed substitute mechanisms for funding the accountability reporting that advertising previously cross-subsidized. Their business model does not require it.
What These Actors Have in Common
Alden Global Capital, Nexstar, Sinclair, Google, and Meta operate in different sectors and pursue different business strategies. What they share is that the continuation of the current media structure — concentrated ownership, weakened regulatory limits, platform dominance of advertising — materially serves their interests, and each has taken documented steps to preserve or extend that structure.
Alden has done so through acquisition: buying newspapers at distressed valuations, applying an extraction model, and operating with minimal regulatory oversight. Its interests are served by a regulatory environment that imposes no public interest obligations on newspaper owners, and by a news market in which the alternative to selling to a hedge fund is often simply closure. The firm has not lobbied visibly, but its ownership decisions have shaped local news availability across hundreds of markets.
Nexstar and Sinclair have been more direct. Their lobbying campaigns — documented in public disclosure filings and reported by OpenSecrets and The Wrap — are explicitly aimed at the regulatory rules that constrain their expansion. Both companies argue the 39 percent ownership cap is an anachronism in a landscape transformed by streaming. Their critics argue the cap exists to preserve local ownership diversity, and that eliminating it would accelerate the centralization of broadcast news production that has already reduced the local character of local TV news.
Google and Meta have not lobbied specifically against local journalism. Their role in the local news collapse is structural rather than intentional — the product of platform design decisions, network effects, and targeting capabilities that made digital advertising more attractive to national advertisers than local media. Those decisions served their own business models; the effect on local news economics has nonetheless been the same.
Each of these actors has a documented interest in the continuation of current conditions. Understanding that interest — where it comes from, how it has been expressed, what it has produced — is the starting point for any realistic assessment of what structural media reform would require and who it would affect.
This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance under human review. See our full AI and editorial practices.