Who owns your news?
Why Nexstar wants 12News — and Trump’s Blessing.
One of the companies behind this week’s drama over the Jimmy Kimmel show is trying to buy up Arizona news stations and become a big player in the local news scene.
Nexstar Media Group is one of the enormous broadcasting companies that put the kibosh on Kimmel’s show last week after Kimmel joked about how the MAGA crowd was reacting to the murder of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk.
Even though ABC relented on Tuesday and let Kimmel get back to his late-night comedy routines, Nexstar, which owns more than 200 television stations, still won’t air the show.
Fellow conservative-owned broadcasting behemoth Sinclair is also boycotting Kimmel.
It’s all very dramatic and raises important questions about free speech, government censorship and how far the owners of big media companies will go to appease Trump officials.
But there’s also a local layer of drama here.
Nexstar doesn’t own much in Arizona right now. But they’re on the verge of buying Tegna, a chain that owns 64 stations, including 12News, where millions of Arizonans tune in for everything from traffic updates to hard-nosed reporting about politics and local government.
The head of Nexstar, Perry Sook, is a big fan of Trump.
As soon as Trump was elected, Sook started pushing for more deregulation and consolidation.1
“We believe that there is value to be created for our shareholders through further consolidation, while driving true and new benefits to the American people who want and deserve fact-based unbiased local news,” he said.
What will Sook do once he owns 12News?
A bunch of great reporters work at 12News. Among them is Craig Harris, who has spent the past year digging up inconvenient facts about Arizona’s school voucher program.
Remember hearing about parents using voucher money to buy diamond rings? That was him. So was the fact that a ton of voucher money was going to wealthy families in Paradise Valley.
But Trump and his allies are big fans of school vouchers. They even pushed through the first-ever national voucher program this summer.
What happens to 12News coverage of school vouchers if the station is owned by a Trump-loving guy who doesn’t want reporters to dig up dirt on vouchers?
For now, the Nexstar-Tegna deal hasn’t been inked yet.
But if Trump officials sign off on the $6.2 billion deal, Nexstar’s stations would cover 80% of the country.
That’s double what the Federal Communications Commission allows right now, so Nexstar needs Trump’s FCC to overhaul the rules.
Lucky for Nexstar, FCC Chair Brendan Carr, the guy who said “we can do this the easy way or the hard way” during the Kimmel affair, is in the middle of a massive deregulation effort.
Duplicate everything
Even if the owners don’t crack down on investigative coverage they don’t like, the merger could still allow one of the best journalism outlets in the state to simply wither away.
During Trump’s first term, Deadspin put together a viral clip that showed dozens of local news anchors at stations owned by Sinclair repeating word-for-word a message calling out “biased news.”
It was a transparent attempt to curry favor with Trump as he attacked the “fake news.”
As funny as that clip of “news duplication” was (and it was legitimately hilarious), Nexstar is actually much worse than Sinclair when it comes to duplicating news.
A researcher at the University of Delaware, Danilo Yanich, published a study last month that showed Nexstar was the “biggest duplicator” of news among TV station chains.
Yanich looked at TV stations where at least 50% of a broadcast was identical to that of another station. He said Nexstar’s reporting “would qualify as plagiarism” if they weren’t owned by the same company.
Nexstar was “by far” the worst offender.
Who owns what?
While the Kimmel controversy pushed media ownership into the limelight for the first time in a while, it’s something we never really stop thinking about at the Agenda.
Today, we’re going to dig into who is behind the news that we curate for you in our daily “In Other News” section.
So we went through the past few weeks of our newsletters and pulled the outlets we include the most.
The Arizona Republic
Arizona’s paper of record has switched ownership eight times since it was founded in 1890, but Gannett acquired it for $2.6 billion in 2000. Over time, the corporate shake-ups have brought massive buyouts, layoffs and shuttered papers.
GateHouse Media bought Gannett for $1.4 billion in 2019, a move that combined the two largest U.S. newspaper owners into one news behemoth based in New York.
Then-GateHouse owner Mike Reed2 took the helm of the new merged corporation and remains CEO of Gannett today. Gannett’s holding data shows it’s owned by a bunch of private equity and investment firms.
The Arizona Daily Star
Lee Enterprises owns Tucson’s biggest paper, but there used to be two big players in town. Gannett used to own the Tucson Citizen, but shut it down in 2009 after deciding it was “no longer viable … to produce two daily newspapers in Tucson.”3
Lee Enterprises is based in Iowa, and Kevin Mowbray is its president and CEO. But like the Republic, the real owners are an amalgamation of vague investment group names. However, a billionaire family investment firm is trying to take over.
The Star has also seen mass layoffs and furloughs because of decisions completely out of reporters’ control.
Arizona Capitol Times
The Capitol Times launched before Arizona was even a state, and was family-owned for a very long time. But in the last two decades, the Capitol Times has gone through a rapid-fire series of ownership changes before State Affairs bought it in 2024.
State Affairs is a new, private-equity-backed company headquartered in Atlanta, and brands itself as “State news and AI-powered policy intelligence.” It lists 15 different newsrooms on its website.
Alison Bethel is CCO and Editor-in-Chief. Jamie Seltzer and Evan Burns are listed as co-founders and board members, and both of them have several other co-founding roles listed on LinkedIn.
Phoenix New Times
The Phoenix New Times started as a counterculture, alternative weekly in 1970, and its founders grew it into a chain of similar papers across the country.
Voice Media Group (which owned the venerable Village Voice out of New York City) purchased the chain in 2013. The company separated the journalism business from Backpages, the online classified site that landed co-founders Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin federal indictments for facilitating prostitution and money laundering.
Denver-based Voice Media Group still owns the Phoenix New Times, and Scott Tobias is its CEO.
Wick Communications
Wick Communications owns dozens of publications across the western U.S., but it’s based in Sierra Vista.
Wick is a family-owned media company, although namesake CEO Francis Wick stepped down last year, and experienced publishing executive Josh O’Connor took over.
It’s kind of the king of rural Arizona, owning newspapers in Nogales, Flagstaff, Green Valley, Kingman, Havasu, Eastern Arizona and beyond.
After Wick acquired Flagstaff’s legacy paper in 2023, the company furloughed employees at other papers and reduced the Sun’s print edition to three days a week.
“I’ll be perfectly honest, this is a very large investment … We’re doubling down on (Arizona), and a craft that we’re very passionate about. We see this as an opportunity to further engage ourselves in areas that we know,” former CEO Francis Wick told us after the Flagstaff acquisition.
Times Media Group
Corporate takeovers have gutted several of Arizona’s legacy publications, like the East Valley Tribune, which was founded in 1891 as Mesa’s first newspaper.
But the paper was on the verge of going under when Times Media Group CEO Steve Strickbine acquired the paper in 2016. The company is known for gutting outlets after its local media acquisitions and forcing patchworks of community newspapers to operate under shoestring budgets.
The Times Media Group owns more than 60 digital and print publications in the Phoenix, Tucson and Los Angeles markets, and it’s headquartered in Tempe. It also bought Ahwatukee Foothills News in 2016, and the Tucson Weekly in 2021.
Independent Newsmedia Inc.
Independent Newsmedia owns more than 20 local Arizona publications, and they’re all branded with the “Independent” nameplate — the Glendale Independent, Scottsdale Independent, Chandler Independent, etc.4
In 1991, founder Joe Smyth transferred ownership of his family’s newspaper chain to a nonprofit holding company to insulate his papers from outside investors. It still operates like a for-profit business, but doesn’t have to send dividends to investors who could influence or take over the company.
Former local journalist Charlene Bisson was named CEO in 2022. Independent Newsmedia is about 70 years old, and Bisson is only the fourth person to take the top spot.
Broadcast stations
Local cable news stations come in two flavors: Network-owned stations and affiliates.
Fox10 Phoenix, for example, is owned outright by the Fox network. But there’s a variety of affiliates (Gray, Scripps, Tegna, Nexstar) that sign network contracts to carry a national network’s programming.
Radio works a little differently: Every station is owned by a specific license holder, even if it carries syndicated or national content.
Phoenix is Arizona’s largest media market, so here’s who owns its major stations, and where those owners are based.5
ABC15: Scripps Media (Cincinnati, OH)
AZFamily (CBS): Gray Media (Atlanta, GA)
12News (NBC): Tegna Inc. (Tysons, Virginia)
Fox10: Fox Television Stations (New York, NY)
Univision Arizona: TelevisaUnivision (Miami, FL and Mexico City)
KTAR: Bonneville International (Salt Lake City, UT)
Fun Fact: It was Ronald Reagan who first started pushing massive deregulation of the public airwaves, allowing greater concentration of ownership of TV and radio stations. The Reagan administration also killed off the Fairness Doctrine, which required companies using the public airwaves to provide roughly equal time to both sides of a debate.
You may remember the name Mike Reed from our email campaign supporting columnist Abe Kwok.
Gannett still owns the paper’s business operations. It’s a long story that involves the Department of Justice, former Attorney General Terry Goddard and antitrust laws.
But the Independent Newsmedia chain does not include “The Arizona Daily Independent,” a right-leaning news outlet out of Pima County.
Arizona PBS and KJZZ aren’t commercial networks, which is why they’re not included here. Technically, Arizona State University owns Arizona PBS and Rio Salado College owns KJZZ.
Very useful information! And you're so right: "It’s all very dramatic and raises important questions about free speech, government censorship and how far the owners of big media companies will go to appease Trump officials." Opposing the Nexstar-Tegna merger should be a high priority. Write to the FCC. It probably won't do much good but at least it will help build the wave of concern about media concentration and potential political influence with it.
Thank you for this great information! Though my professional life was spent in science and academia, I have long been passionate about journalism (especially newspapers). I really mourn the days of big metro areas having two or more major newspapers. It's been exciting to see the emergence of Arizona Agenda and similar independent local news outlets. Really appreciated learning more about some of the media outlets in the state outside my own area. (Note: you left Telemundo Arizona off the list of TV stations...)