Abstract:Local news stations are often considered to be reliable sources of non-politicized information, particularly local concerns that residents care about. Because these stations are trusted news sources, viewers are particularly susceptible to the information they report. The Sinclair Broadcast group is a broadcasting company that has acquired many local news stations in the last decade. We investigate the effects of local news stations being acquired by Sinclair: how does coverage change? We use computational methods to investigate changes in internet content put out by local news stations before and after being acquired by Sinclair and in comparison to national news outlets. We find that there is clear evidence that local news stations report more frequently on national news at the expense of local topics, and that their coverage of polarizing national topics increases.
| Comments: | Published at NLP+CSS Workshop @ ACL 2026 |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2510.07060 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2510.07060v2 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.07060 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite |
Submission history
From: Sophia Hager [view email]
[v1]
Wed, 8 Oct 2025 14:27:00 UTC (186 KB)
[v2]
Wed, 13 May 2026 18:39:23 UTC (189 KB)