Does Local News Stay Local?: Online Content Shifts in Sinclair-Acquired Stations
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
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.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 6 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2025.
Builds on
6 of 32 references.
References · 6
- 2013Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Spacecited by 4,346
- 2017Word Embeddings Quantify 100 Years of Gender and Ethnic Stereotypescited by 251
- 2019Analyzing Polarization in Social Media: Method and Application to Tweets on 21 Mass Shootingscited by 67
- 2020When do Word Embeddings Accurately Reflect Surveys on our Beliefs About People?cited by 11
- 2022NELA-Local: A Dataset of U.S. Local News Articles for the Study of County-level News Ecosystemscited by 6
- 2021Local News Online and COVID in the U.S.: Relationships among Coverage, Cases, Deaths, and Audiencecited by 2
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
1 paper.