If you’ve ever watched a local newscast or scrolled through a station’s social feed and thought, “These people don’t live in the same Oklahoma I do,” you’re not wrong. Most “local” news in this state isn’t actually local anymore.
Out-of-state corporations own almost every major station, and decisions about what gets covered and how are made in boardrooms hundreds or thousands of miles from Tulsa, OKC, Lawton, Enid, and the towns that make up the heart of this state.
These companies bring in young producers, fresh-out-of-college reporters, and social media staffers who often come from big cities, coastal schools, or places with no cultural overlap with Oklahoma.
They’re dropped into newsrooms where their job is to interpret a state they’ve never lived in, for people they don’t yet understand, while working under bosses who aren’t here at all.
The disconnect shows. That gap becomes even wider when you look at the values mismatch.
Many of the people staffing these stations – through no fault of their own – simply don’t share the lived experiences or priorities of the communities they’re covering. They may be ambitious, politically left-leaning, highly mobile, and eager to climb the career ladder.
Many don’t have kids here, don’t belong to churches here, don’t have deep ties to rural Oklahoma or tribal communities, and don’t plan to stay long.
So naturally, they don’t always grasp why faith is central to so many families, why people here value stability over trend-chasing, why topics like schools, agriculture, local control, and public safety hit differently, or why national narratives don’t always stick in Oklahoma the way they do on cable news or social media. And when the people producing the news don’t share the rhythms, concerns, humor, frustrations, or worldview of their audience, the coverage drifts — not because anyone is trying to be biased, but because they’re operating from a completely different frame of reference.
This is how you end up with local coverage that feels temporary, formulaic, and disconnected.
Stories get shaped to fit national talking points instead of local reality.
Social posts sound like they were written for a Brooklyn audience instead of Broken Arrow.
New reporters arrive each year, learn the job, gain a reel, and leave as soon as they can jump to a bigger market. And corporate owners, who haven’t set foot in Oklahoma in years, continue pushing strategies based on what appeals to shareholders, not what serves communities.
No wonder so many Oklahomans feel like the news “doesn’t get us” anymore, becuase most of the people making it aren’t rooted here, and the ones making the final calls aren’t here at all.