Can the Streaming Giants Replace What Local TV Lost?
The question sounds almost unfair. Of course Netflix is not going to cover your city council meeting. Of course Amazon Prime is not going to send a reporter to the school board hearing. That is not what they do. But that is precisely John Chachas’s point.
Writing in Boss Magazine, the veteran media banker and CEO of Inyo Broadcast Holdings asks what happens to civic information infrastructure when local TV and local newspapers have been economically destroyed, and the platforms that replaced them have no interest in the civic function those institutions served. It is not a rhetorical question. It is a structural one. And it does not have a reassuring answer.
Chachas spent his career inside the media industry, advising on deals including the $18 billion buyout of Clear Channel Communications and E.W. Scripps’ acquisition of ION Media. He has watched local broadcasting survive cable, satellite, and the early internet. What he is watching now is different. The economic models are not adapting. They are collapsing.
The core of the problem is that Google and Facebook did not compete with local newspapers. They extracted value from local journalism without compensating the organizations that created it. Search and social platforms aggregated local news, drove traffic to content without paying licensing fees, and redirected advertising dollars that would have flowed to local publishers. The newsrooms producing that content could not survive.
“The big and destructive power of Google and Facebook was left totally unchecked,” Chachas argues, “until the local media industry was essentially destroyed.” The vacuum left by local journalism is measurable. Corruption in small governments goes unchecked when there are no reporters at city hall. School board decisions with lasting consequences receive no scrutiny. Practical, hyperlocal public health information goes unprovided.
The streaming services that now dominate media consumption represent a different kind of media concentration, one oriented entirely toward entertainment rather than civic information. Netflix and Amazon Prime collectively spend more on a single prestige drama than many mid-sized city papers spent on journalism over decades. None of that spending touches local accountability reporting.
The tools people need to live their lives are not a luxury. When market forces eliminate them, policy has to fill the gap. That is the lesson Chachas draws from watching local news die. Whether policymakers will apply it before AI does the same thing to employment is the open question he is pressing.