Does Local News Stay Local?: Online Content Shifts in Sinclair-Acquired Stations

A study by Wanner, Hager, and Field found that local news stations acquired by Sinclair Broadcast Group shifted their YouTube content toward national and polarizing topics, reducing local coverage. The findings suggest Sinclair's acquisitions may increase political polarization among local news viewers.

Abstract Local news stations are often considered to be reliable sources of non-politicized information, particularly local concerns that residents care about. 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 analyze YouTube content put out by local news stations through topic modeling, log-odds ratios, and word embedding analyses to investigate changes after being acquired by Sinclair. We find 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. These findings associate acquisition by Sinclair with increasing polarization and nationalization of news content, which in-turn risks increasing political polarization of local news viewers.- Anthology ID: - 2026.nlpcss-1.3 - Volume: Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science /volumes/2026.nlpcss-1/ - Month: - July - Year: - 2026 - Address: - San Diego - Editors: Dallas Card /people/dallas-card/ , Anjalie Field /people/anjalie-field/ , Katherine Keith /people/katherine-keith/ , Julia Mendelsohn /people/julia-mendelsohn/ - Venues: NLP+CSS /venues/nlpcss/ | WS /venues/ws/ - SIG: - Publisher: - Association for Computational Linguistics - Note: - Pages: - 37–82 - Language: - URL: https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlpcss-1.3/ https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlpcss-1.3/ - DOI: 10.18653/v1/2026.nlpcss-1.3 https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.nlpcss-1.3 - Cite ACL : - Miriam Wanner, Sophia Hager, and Anjalie Field. 2026. Does Local News Stay Local?: Online Content Shifts in Sinclair-Acquired Stations https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlpcss-1.3/ . In Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science , pages 37–82, San Diego. Association for Computational Linguistics. - Cite Informal : Does Local News Stay Local?: Online Content Shifts in Sinclair-Acquired Stations https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlpcss-1.3/ Wanner et al., NLP+CSS 2026 - PDF: https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlpcss-1.3.pdf https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlpcss-1.3.pdf