Study shows 'Sinclair effect' on local news
Following a firestorm of recent media criticism leveled at Sinclair Broadcast Group, staff at Sinclair-owned stations insisted the company's conservative bent didn't affect local news coverage, but a recent study and former employees say otherwise.
Last week, media outlets around the country reported on new "must-run" segments on Sinclair-owned stations, including Seattle's KOMO-TV. Those segments featured anchors sticking word-for-word to a Sinclair-written script warning of the dangers of "one-sided news stories plaguing our country," which struck many observers as disingenuous and self-serving given Sinclair's well-established practice of producing right-leaning segments that it requires its stations to run.
The story went viral after Deadspin posted a video mashup showing dozens of Sinclair anchors around the country reading a statement that, according to multiple reports from around the county, was forced upon them.
"They're certainly not happy about it," a KOMO newsroom employee told SeattlePI last week. "It's certainly a forced thing."
In a Monday Facebook post, KOMO anchor Molly Shen wrote that while she had been called a "company pawn" and "hostage" in the uproar over the statement, she "made the personal decision to record the video." Shen encouraged viewers to communicate any concerns about Sinclair's national segments, but maintained that KOMO's local coverage remained independent from its owners' politics.
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But an April 4 study out of Emory University in Atlanta found that Sinclair ownership does, in fact, impact local coverage. The Emory study, a working paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed, ran textual analysis on transcripts from 743 stations from around the country from mid-2017 to early 2018 in order to determine what the individual broadcasts were discussing.
"We're making a kind of apples-to-apples comparison," Josh McCrain, one of the study's authors, told SeattlePI. "We're not comparing a station in rural Missouri to a station in New York City."
Sinclair's $240 million acquisition of Bonten Media, completed on Sept. 1, 2017, also allowed McCrain co-author Gregory J. Martin to compare the content of a handful of stations before and after Sinclair took over.
The study found that Sinclair-owned stations decreased their local politics coverage by about 4 percent, but increased their coverage of national politics by a whopping 25 percent. The stations acquired by Sinclair during the months in question saw a shift in coverage within about a month.
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