‘Heartbroken’: staff laid off as California TV station abruptly closes newsroom; The Guardian, September 25, 2025

Dani Anguiano, The Guardian; ‘Heartbroken’: staff laid off as California TV station abruptly closes newsroom

[Kip Currier: This is another stark indicator of the dangers that media consolidation represents. Media consolidation impedes the ability of citizens to access information, particularly local information. Informed citizenries are vital for functioning democracies.]

[Excerpt] 

"This week KION-TV, a broadcast news outlet on California’s central coast that’s been on the air for more than 50 years, announced it was entering a “new chapter” with a San Francisco CBS affiliate to bring expanded coverage to its viewers...

“Our partnership with KPIX ensures that viewers across the Monterey, Salinas and Santa Cruz region continue to receive the high-quality local journalism they deserve,” Rall Bradley, an executive at the News-Press & Gazette, said...

Meanwhile, workers report that Telemundo 23, which was housed at KION, is also shutting down, leaving an area with a majority-Latino population without a Spanish-language news show.

Local news has collapsed across the US in recent decades, with a 75% drop in local journalists since 2002, according to a report from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News, which describes the decline as “alarming and widespread”. One in three US counties do not have the equivalent of one full-time local journalist, and an average of 2.5 newspapers shut down each week.

Monterey County Now described the development as a “devastating blow” to local journalism. Jeanette Bent, the station’s managing editor, told the outlet: “It’s a disservice to this community and we’re all heartbroken.”"

Sinclair's Propaganda Bomb Is What Media Critics Have Warned About Since Reagan; Esquire, April 2, 2018

Charles P. Pierce, Esquire; Sinclair's Propaganda Bomb Is What Media Critics Have Warned About Since Reagan

[Kip Currier: 
During my undergraduate degree at the University of Pittsburgh, I spent my junior year in Kobe, Japan, attending a Japanese university and living with a Japanese chemistry professor emeritus and his wife. Toward the end of my year there, my Japanese skills had gotten proficient enough to have some really "meaty", impactful discussions. I've never forgotten a conversation I had with my host mother, Haruko, who shared her experiences as a 20-something housewife raising her young sons in the waning days of World War II, while her husband taught at one of the Japanese Naval Colleges on the Japan Sea.

U.S. forces were poised to land in Japan and the Japanese state media were disseminating stories about all manner of alleged atrocities the media said would occur if the Americans were to step on Japanese soil. My host mother Haruko said that because the Japanese Imperial Army controlled the media, the populace, people like her, had no access to information other than what the state media put out via radio and newspapers. As an island archipelago with no land borders with other nations, this was especially true for Japan. Years later, she said she came to understand how they had been misled by the Imperial Army's disinformation and propaganda. I never forgot how important information--access to the truth--is.

Access to information--truthful, trusted, verifiable information--is the linchpin of a free and independent press, informed citizenry, and healthy, functioning, questioning democracies. James Madison's 1822 admonition about information, cited in the excerpt below, is as timely as ever.]

"Not only is this a cautionary tale about media consolidation—Sinclair is inches away from owning stations in Chicago and Los Angeles—it’s also a cautionary tale about the imbalance between labor and management in a very visible industry. When the mash-up appeared this weekend, anonymous Sinclair employees leapt to the electric Twitter machine to talk about the read-or-die pressure on the employees in the company’s local stations. And, when this happens in the context of an administration dedicated to keeping people stupid enough to believe all its lies, you have reached a critical mass driving the country inexorably toward the result of Mr. Madison’s great warning:

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.”"