On Dec. 12, the studio lights turned off for the last time at Ralston Reports, the hard-hitting public affairs program on KSNV-TV in Las Vegas. Hosted by the veteran political pundit Jon Ralston, who’d been on the air for 14 years and had also written for both Vegas papers before starting his own website, the program had a reputation for breaking news, tackling tough issues, and pulling no punches. The show’s end, wrote Steve Sebelius in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was “bad news for most everybody.”
There have been plenty of tributes to Ralston, a rare local political journalist with a national profile. What hasn’t been as widely noted is that the cancellation of Ralston Reports is part of a broader retrenchment in political coverage and public-affairs programming. Just a couple years ago, an independent station owner, Jim Rogers, was making waves in Nevada with his big commitments to local news, including political commentary and public affairs. Now Rogers has died, several of his stations have been sold to a big chain, and the programming looks a lot more like what you’d find anywhere else.
In a 2012 profile of Rogers, the former owner of Intermountain West Communications Co., Jay Jones wrote for CJR:
The king of political commentary in Nevada, Jon Ralston, anchors Face-to-Face [a precursor of Ralston Reports], a half-hour program that airs Monday through Friday statewide from its Las Vegas base. Then there’s Nevada Newsmakers, a similar show based in Reno, which churns out four programs a week. The weekly To the Point is hosted by the Las Vegas Sun’s political editor, Anjeanette Damon. All three are carried statewide.
And there’s still more. The newest public affairs program from the Rogers stable, The Agenda, began airing each weekday in Las Vegas earlier this year. It combines interviews and analysis of political issues with sparring between the co-hosts, liberal Hugh Jackson and conservative/libertarian Elizabeth Crum.
By early 2013, TV trade outlets were reporting about how Rogers was replacing syndicated programming with journalism, preparing to make KSNV “as close to a non-stop news station as a network affiliate can be.” He ditched Judge Judy and Inside Edition and shuffled off Dr. Phil in order to air a five-hour block of news on weekdays. Plans called for nearly 12 hours of news programming every weekday by 2016.
But now that landscape has significantly changed. Nevada Newsmakers is still on the air, but The Agenda blinked out in 2013. To The Point is also kaput. Ralston’s show is gone, and the afternoon political talk show What’s Your Point? has just been cancelled as well.
And Rogers is gone too, having died in June. Intermountain’s Reno station was sold to the Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of a handful of companies that is buying up local stations amid a nationwide consolidation trend, in November 2013, while Rogers was alive. Sinclair purchased KSNV, the Vegas station, this fall.
I reached out to Ralston, who has just joined the Reno Gazette-Journal as a columnist, and hosts of some of the other shows to ask about how the cancellation of Ralston Reports fits into broader trends in the Nevada media market. They all said pretty much the same thing: There’s a world of difference between Jim Rogers and Sinclair—and for that matter, any other owner in local TV.
“No one from Sinclair ever met with myself or my team to discuss the cancellation,” Ralston said. “I was told it was because Sinclair was cutting back on political commentary.”
He added:
Rogers was committed to as much news as possible. But that is not the mark of a guy concerned about the bottom line. Sinclair surely is. So be it. I have nothing but fond memories of Channel 3 and our nearly 14 years on various stations doing the program. I do worry about the coverage of politics and government by local TV, but I also am confident we will get the show back on, in some form.
While we may not see that “non-stop news” format on Sinclair stations, the company says it’s not bailing on local news, just the sort of political coverage and commentary Rogers championed. The station’s weekday schedule still lists news programming from 3-7:30pm. Ralston Reports and What’s Your Point? “were both replaced with more traditional news programming because Sinclair made a determination based on audience interest and viewing that the more traditional news programming would provide a greater public service to the Las Vegas market,” said Barry Faber, the company’s executive vice president.
Faber didn’t reply to follow-up questions about a decline in coverage of politics and local government, and what that “traditional news programming” would look like. He also didn’t cite ratings details—but the big bet on news and politics had not led to big ratings for KSNV, the Review-Journal reported in December 2013, even as competitors saw their ratings rise with syndicated programming.
“Whether the shows on Jim’s stations got great ratings was secondary to their value to the community and the quality, as he saw it, of the broadcasts,” said Elizabeth Crum Thompson, a former co-host of The Agenda. “Most broadcast stations, of course, don’t make decisions based on those criteria. I presume that Sinclair is making decisions solely based on the cost-of-programming versus ad revenue on a show-by-show basis.”
“I think Rogers had a personal interest in creating public affairs programming, even if it didn’t result in the most financially lucrative outcomes,” said Anjeanette Damon, a former Las Vegas Sun journalist now at the Reno paper, who was featured on To The Point.
“He was the only one in this market to run prime time daily political programming,” Damon said. “I can’t speak to Sinclair’s plans, but with Rogers gone, we have certainly seen a decline in political programming. Ralston’s absence on the airwaves will definitely be felt.”
Corey Hutchins is CJR’s correspondent based in Colorado, where he teaches journalism at Colorado College. A former alt-weekly reporter in South Carolina, he was twice named journalist of the year in the weekly division by the SC Press Association. Hutchins writes about politics and media for the Colorado Independent and worked on the State Integrity Investigation at the Center for Public Integrity; he has contributed to Slate, The Nation, the Washington Post, and others. Follow him on Twitter @coreyhutchins or email him at coreyhutchins@gmail.com.