December 09, 2025 01:29 PM UTC

Denver TV News Could Soon Be Fox 31, CBS4...and That's It

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• by: Colorado Pols

If right-wing news drivel is your thing, then you’ve got plenty to be excited about in Colorado.

We’ve been paying close attention to efforts by right-wing media outlet Nexstar Media Group to buy Tegna and take over 9News in Denver. As we noted in August, if Nexstar’s merger is approved, the company would almost certainly close up 9News and just run Fox 31 newscasts on the 9News signal instead — similar to what happened in 2009 after Fox 31 and KWGN Channel 2 were merged together.

Earlier this month, the FCC officially opened up its review process to formalize efforts — at President Trump’s behest — to eliminate longstanding regulations prohibiting one company from owning multiple news outlets in the same market; eliminating this regulation is the only way that Nexstar’s plans can go through. Petitions against the FCC rule change are due by December 31.

As Corey Hutchins reports for his excellent media watchdog website “Inside the News in Colorado,” right-wing broadcaster Sinclair Media is now looking to buy out E.W. Scripps, which owns Denver7, which would decimate Denver’s media landscape:

If the Nexstar deal gets FCC approval and is successful, that would see Fox31 gobbling up 9NEWS. And if the Sinclair bid can get through corporate boardroom high-finance hurdles, then Sinclair would scarf down Denver7. Such a one-two punch would leave CBS Colorado as the lone unaffected station — an outlet with an owner who one close media watcher has recently observed shifting to “appease the right.”

Should these two separate media consolidation deals go through, it could radically alter Denver’s TV news market.

In 2018, Sheelah Kolhatkar wrote an in-depth story for the New Yorker about the “growth of Sinclair’s conservative media empire” and its executive chairman, whom she described as an ardent supporter of Donald Trump who “has not been shy about using his stations to advance his political ideology.”

That same year, the Baltimore-area broadcaster had made embarrassing headlines for its promos by local news personalities across the country who were “eerily reciting identical scripts with phrases often used by the president when criticizing mainstream news organizations,” according to the L.A. Times.

Sinclair already owns KOAA TV in Colorado Springs and is looking to buy KKCO (NBC) and KJCT (ABC) in Grand Junction. If both the Nexstar and Sinclair deals get approved, the only somewhat independent news stations left in Colorado would be KKTV in Colorado Springs and CBS4 in Denver — the latter of which is already only “news” in the barest sense of the word.

The Trump administration isn’t even trying to hide its ultimate goal here; FCC Chairman Brendan Carr literally wrote the chapter on media consolidation in the infamous “Project 2025” document. Nexstar CEO Perry Sook name-dropped President Trump in the very first sentence of his statement about the proposed merger with Tegna back in August. When Trump and Carr went after “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in September, both Sinclair and Tegna dutifully pulled the show from their respective stations and kept it off the air even after Disney relented under pressure from viewers.

You don’e need to be a Democrat to be concerned about this media consolidation in Colorado. As conservative commentator Jon Caldara wrote recently:

“When the new owners of channel 9 start shedding costs at all four of their Front Range news stations, it likely won’t result in more coverage of conservative stories, just less coverage of all stories.”

Yep.

We’ve seen it with Fox 31 and Channel 2, and we’ve seen it with the death of the Rocky Mountain News. When there are fewer news outlets in a given market, there is never MORE news coverage that follows.