Is Local News the Next Spirit Airlines? 

On May 2, Spirit Airlines shut down without warning and 17,000 workers lost their jobs overnight. The airline had filed for bankruptcy twice before, but the proximate cause of its collapse traces back further to 2023, when the Biden administration blocked JetBlue's acquisition of Spirit to protect competition. Spirit got neither the merger nor a future. 

Nexstar, one of the largest local broadcast companies in the country, is attempting to acquire Tegna, which owns 64 local television stations across 51 markets. The merger — a $6.2 billion deal that would create a stronger, better-resourced local broadcast company — cleared both the FCC and the Department of Justice in March after full regulatory review. In April, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction halting the integration, driven largely by a challenge from DirecTV, which operates a competing pay-TV service and has a direct financial interest in keeping Nexstar smaller. The injunction was issued under the banner of public interest. 

Local broadcast news is fighting to survive in a media ecosystem dominated by streaming platforms, social media, and AI-generated content that operates under none of the rules broadcasters do. The journalists covering local communities need scale to compete with that. 

More than 130 local newspapers have closed since 2024. Fewer than 1,000 daily print newspapers remain in circulation. The number of news desert counties has risen to 213, and over 1,500 counties across the country are down to a single news source. 

Just last month, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a 240-year-old institution near and dear to so many Pennsylvanians, narrowly avoided shutting down only to see roughly half of its newsroom cut as it transitioned to new nonprofit ownership. If a paper with that history and that reach is barely hanging on, no community in America should assume its local news is safe. 

Pew Research Center found that 85% of U.S. adults believe local news is at least somewhat important to their community's well-being, with 44% calling it extremely or very important. The problem is that the economics of serving them have collapsed around an industry that Google and Meta hollowed out by capturing the advertising revenue local newsrooms once depended on. 

Local broadcast news is public infrastructure. It tells families when a tornado is coming, when schools are closed, when crime is rising, and when their representatives cast controversial votes. For millions of Americans without reliable broadband or smartphone access, over-the-air broadcast is their only link to real-time emergency information – which is precisely why FEMA and the FCC distribute Wireless

Emergency Alerts through broadcast infrastructure. Local news is one of the last remaining safeguards of accountability and truth in American civic life. 

The Nexstar-Tegna combined company would have the scale to modernize aging broadcast infrastructure, increase news hours, and keep newsrooms staffed in markets where the economics would otherwise make that impossible. 

Spirit Airlines had the same problem. It needed more scale to survive, but the merger that could have provided it never happened. The Big Four airlines now control 75% of the domestic market. Local broadcast is heading toward its own version of that consolidation, except instead of fewer cheap flights, the result is fewer newsrooms covering the communities that need them most. 

Patrick J. Murphy was the 32nd Acting Secretary of the Army and a U.S. Congressman (D-PA). He is a Nonresidential Fellow at the Penn Wharton Budget Model Office.