This study reports the results of a survey of television station programmers to determine the reasons behind stations’ decisions to not provide (or to cease providing) local news broadcasts. The results indicate that financial considerations were the most common factor discouraging the provision of local news. The results also suggest that deregulatory decisions by the FCC in the 1980s (which, among other things, eliminated explicit news programming requirements) played a part in some stations’ decisions to eliminate news programming.