Not sure that you needed to commission a study to find this out, but a study by 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The Emory study, a working paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed, ran textual analysis on transcripts from 743 stations from around the country from mid-2017 to early 2018 in order to determine what the individual broadcasts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.

Sinclair Senior Vice President of News Scott Livingston called the study "flawed" in a Thursday conversation with SeattlePI, speculating that the authors "set out to prove a theory rather than find the truth." Livingston said 96 percent of Sinclair stations' content is controlled by local newsrooms and said if researchers wanted to fully analyze Sinclair's impact on local coverage, they should look at data over a multi-year period.

Why might Sinclair emphasize national news content over local coverage? Since the Emory study found very little change in viewership before and after Sinclair took ownership of stations, the authors suggest cost might play a big factor.

Sinclair is the largest owner/operator of stations in the country, with 193 nationwide. Local reporting is expensive, and national segments produced at Sinclair's Maryland headquarters can take up air space on all of the company's stations. That makes economic sense for Sinclair, which reported more than $2.7 billion in revenue in each of the past two years.

In addition to favoring national news more than other stations in the same market, Sinclair stations also ranked higher in the Emory study in terms of right-leaning "slant scores," which are based on the repetition of ideologically-linked phrases.

Sometimes Sinclair's influence on local reporting is less ideological and more personal. A well-publicized example came after The Seattle Times wrote a scathing editorial decrying a round of layoffs at KOMO following Sinclair's purchase.

"Welcome to the Northwest, Sinclair," the October 2013 staff editorial read in part. "Decimating the soul of this city's last locally owned commercial TV station is a heck of an introduction."

In response, a KOMO reporter was ordered by Sinclair to work on a story about the demise of the newspaper industry, with a heavy focus on the Times.

H/T Seattle PI