A spin-off of Louisiana's vendor factions
Louisiana political committees have paid the state's television stations $121 million since 2000. This is where that money went: which of the seven Nielsen markets it bought, which stations banked it, and — after a year of consolidation — which companies now collect it. The surprise is that the biggest station group by count is not the biggest by revenue.
The pulse
Plotted by year, the money has a heartbeat: the state's governor's races — 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015, 2019, 2023 — account for most of every dollar ever paid to these stations. The 2019 Edwards–Rispone runoff alone moved $26.4M, more than the eleven quietest years combined.
The map
Nielsen slices the country into Designated Market Areas — the unit a TV ad buy actually purchases. Louisiana's 64 parishes fall into seven, from New Orleans (№ 50 nationally) down to Alexandria (№ 183). Click a market for its stations and what each has been paid.
Louisiana's 64 parishes, colored by DMA. The Shreveport, Monroe–El Dorado, Alexandria and New Orleans markets continue into Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi; only the Louisiana side is drawn. Rank and household counts are the 2024–25 Nielsen season.
Where the money over-weights
Divide each market's spending by its TV households and the map stops being about size. Alexandria and Lafayette draw close to $77 per household — well above the statewide $60.41 — while Shreveport, the state's second-largest market, draws just $42.80. Campaigns pay a premium for the contested middle of the state and quietly skip the Republican northwest. New Orleans, for all its size, lands exactly at par.
Bars show dollars per TV household, 2000–2026. The vertical rule is the statewide average; a bar past it means committees spent more on that market than its size alone would predict.
Ownership
Twelve months of deals redrew this ledger. Nexstar owns or operates thirteen of the thirty stations — the most of any group — but collects 30.5% of the money. Gray Media holds ten and collects 47.6%, because its ten include the news-leading CBS or NBC affiliate in six of seven markets. Station count measures reach; revenue measures which newscast the ads actually run inside.
MAR 19 2026Nexstar closed its $6.2B purchase of Tegna — WWL-TV and WUPL in New Orleans — then a preliminary injunction won by DirecTV and eight state attorneys general froze integration in April. WUPL's divestiture was reported pending. Marked *.
MAY 15 2026Gray and Scripps completed a five-market station swap; KATC Lafayette joined Gray.
MAY 2026Gray closed its $171M purchase of ten Allen Media stations, including KADN and KLAF-LD — giving Gray both Lafayette's ABC and Fox.
NOTEStations marked ·op are owned by a nominal licensee (Mission, White Knight, American Spirit) but operated by the named group under sharing agreements. Dollars are attributed to the operator, since deals under those agreements are sold by the operator's sales staff.
The ledger
Total paid to each station by Louisiana political committees, 2000–2026. Within every market the order is the same as the newsroom pecking order: the CBS or NBC leader takes the top line, and the CW and low-power outlets divide what is left. WWL-TV leads the state at $15.3M; WBRL-CD, at the other end, has taken $27K in twenty-six years.
Hover a station for its network, owner, and biggest buyers. Amounts are nominal dollars, not inflation-adjusted.
The buyers
Two governors dominate the whole century of filings. John Bel Edwards spent $11.3M on television across 29 of the 30 stations; Bobby Jindal spent $8.6M. Behind them sit the outside groups that fought the 2019 and 2023 races — the RGA's Right Direction PAC, Gumbo PAC, and The Fund for Louisiana's Future — each buying nearly every station in the state.
Committee spending across all 30 stations. Party is the filing's own label, except that Louisiana files most PACs and some candidates as OTH, which says nothing about which side bought the airtime. Where a filer's alignment is public record the label is corrected — the RGA's PAC to Republican; Gumbo PAC, Walter Boasso and Buddy Leach to Democratic; Jay Dardenne to Republican. A filing that states a party is never overridden, and every correction is listed in build_station_spend.py.
Method & sources
Dollar figures are computed by build_station_spend.py in this repo, which reads 1.48 million expenditure rows from the Louisiana Ethics Administration filings (via the campaign-finance project's .la_cache) and sums what every committee paid each station. Three corrections matter:
Spelling variants. One station is filed 15–30 ways — KADN, KADN-TV, KADN - TV, KADN-FOX, KADN-TV CHANNEL 15. All fold to one call sign.
Radio sisters. WWL and KTAL share their call signs with radio stations. Rows explicitly marked radio (WWL-AM, WWL RADIO, KTAL-FM) are excluded — in total. Rows carrying only the bare call sign cannot be resolved either way; they are counted as television, and that amount — , nearly all of it WWL — is disclosed here rather than buried. Treat WWL-TV's and KTAL's totals as ceilings.
Combined buys. sits in rows naming two co-owned stations at once (KARD-TV KTVE-TV, WGMB WVLA-TV); those amounts are split evenly rather than assigned to whichever sorts first.
One gap: the 2008 expenditure file is absent from the upstream data release, so 2008 is missing from every figure on this page. It was an off-cycle year — the surrounding off-years run well under $1M — so the effect on the totals is small, but it is not zero.
Parish boundaries are U.S. Census cartographic files; parish-to-DMA assignment was computed by point-in-polygon against Nielsen DMA boundaries and cross-checked against published market lists. Ownership is as reported through September 2026.