Local TV's Best Friend? The Kochs

The Koch brothers are planning to spend $889 million on the 2016 political campaign. It can be forgiven that owners of local television stations see the partisan zeal of the Kochs and other politically engaged billionaires as a great gift from heaven, or at least from the US Supreme Court. That’s because, despite the rise of new digital organizing techniques and the persistence of old-style phone banks and door-to-door efforts, political spending in this country mainly means one thing -- buying airtime on local TV.

At Gannett, which has 46 stations, political TV advertising brought in $92.4 million in the fourth quarter, helping drive a 117 percent gain in broadcast revenue. When you consider that, in lots of countries, political airtime is something that broadcasters have to provide for free, this really is a remarkable situation. It would be lovely if local TV stations used this money to improve their news operations and do a better job of covering elections. But in general, local TV news operations don’t amount to much. The big news-gatherers have always been the newspapers.The money seems to be going instead into acquisitions and payouts to shareholders. Those shareholders, in turn, should be thanking the Koch brothers.