Sinclair's Push Of Their Stations to the Right
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New York Magazine writes more about how Sinclair is whoring out their local news anchors to peddle President Trump's agenda along with the management of Sinclair.
This week across the country, anchors at Sinclair stations across the country and looking into the camera and reading nothing but straight propaganda from the White House and Sinclair owners.
NY Mag writes this isn’t how things were supposed to be. Shortly after Sinclair unveiled its plan to purchase Tribune Media, the New York Times assured its readers that, eventually, the company’s propagandistic ambitions would be checked by market forces.
A new study from Emory University political scientists Gregory J. Martin and Josh McCrain suggests that both of these explanations are wrong: The ideological bent of Sinclair’s programming does turn off local news viewers — but broadcasting such unpopular, ideological content is (probably) a good business decision for the company, anyway.
Martin and McCrain analyzed the content and ratings of 743 local television stations over the final eight months of 2017 — a period during which Sinclair acquired a bunch of local channels, and revamped its news programming. The researchers found that Sinclair-acquired stations became both more right-wing in their ideological orientation (as calculated by “text-based measures of ideological slant”) and more focused on national politics (as opposed to local politics) than their competitors did over the same period.
They discovered that the Sinclair-acquired stations did seem to pay a price for these programming changes — but not a terribly large one:
[Our] estimate of ratings changes at the Sinclair-acquired stations is negative, and particularly so in relatively Democratic-leaning markets where Sinclair’s conservative-slanted coverage of national politics has less appeal. In ratings terms, the shift towards national politics was costly to these stations: viewers appear to prefer the more local-heavy mix of coverage to the more national-heavy one. Nonetheless, there are very clear economies of scale for a conglomerate owner in covering national as opposed to local politics, thanks to the ability to distribute the same content in multiple markets. Given that the ratings penalty we document is fairly small, it seems likely that these cost efficiencies dominate in Sinclair’s calculus.
Local TV news has never been the pride of the Fourth Estate. But as one of few institutions of regional journalism that still boasts a functioning business model, it could theoretically play a part in filling the (ever-growing) void of state-level political reporting. Martin and McCrain’s study suggests that there is consumer demand for such information.
But the consolidation of broadcast ownership — that the Federal Communications Commission willfully accelerated last year — appears to be rendering such demand irrelevant.
