Sinclair, the pro-Trump, conservative company taking over local news, explained
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/3/17180020/sinclair-broadcast-group-conservative-trump-david-smith-local-news-tv-affiliate
Sinclair, the pro-Trump, conservative company taking over local news, explained
Sinclair reaches 40 percent of households and soon will reach 72 percent.
By Dylan Matthews @dylanmatt dylan@vox.com Apr 3, 2018, 2:20pm EDT
This month, the 193 local TV affiliates owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group began running a series of promotional segments, warning of a scourge of fake news promoted by members of the media [who] use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think.
The segments, which echo the Trump administrations anti-media rhetoric, are eerily uniform across all Sinclair affiliates, so much so that Deadspins Timothy Burke was able to edit them together into a supercut showing dozens of Sinclair anchors saying the exact same words.
The video is just the most recent example of Sinclair stations strong partisan tilt. A recent paper by Emory University political scientists Gregory Martin and Josh McCrain found that when Sinclair buys a local station, its local news program begin to cover more national and less local politics, the coverage becomes more conservative, and viewership actually falls suggesting that the rightward tilt isnt enacted as a strategy to win more viewers but as part of a persuasion effort.
A report from the Pew Research Center last year found that 37 percent of Americans say they frequently rely on local TV for news not far behind the 45 percent of Americans who say they get news from Facebook, and ahead of the 33 percent who say they look at news websites and apps, the 28 percent who watch cable news, the 26 percent who watch national nightly news, and the 18 percent who still read print newspapers.
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https://www.vox.com/2018/4/4/17190240/sinclair-local-tv-map-data
Sinclairs pro-Trump news is taking over local TV. See if they own your station.
This map says it all.
By Alvin Chang @alv9nalvin @vox.com Apr 4, 2018, 8:20am EDT