It could be a scene in a dystopian fantasy: A chorus of news anchors warning viewers about the scourge of media bias, all reciting the same words in stations across the country. “The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. Some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias,” they intone. “This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.” The level of groupthink on display is so glaring—so on-the-nose—that the video, created by Deadspin, was widely shared on social media as evidence of the real-life dystopian turn America has taken under Donald Trump, who has regularly maligned the free press as “fake news.”

How America's largest local TV owner turned its news anchors into soldiers in Trump's war on the media: https://t.co/iLVtKRQycL pic.twitter.com/dMdSGellH3 — Deadspin (@Deadspin) March 31, 2018

The dozens of anchors who recited this identical editorial are employed by Sinclair Broadcast Group, the conservative media behemoth that has gobbled up local news stations across the country. If a proposed merger between Sinclair and Tribune Media is allowed to proceed, this type of propaganda would reach nearly three-quarters of American households.



Sinclair’s growing reach is part of an ongoing crisis, the latest evidence that conservative plutocrats are remaking the media landscape—from alt-weeklies to mainstream magazines to the broadcast networks—in their image. In a divided era, local news broadcasts remain the rare form of journalism that is trusted broadly. The Sinclair takeover could not only have far-reaching political consequences, but also further erode trust in media by introducing hyper-partisanship into local news.



However, the controversy surrounding Sinclair has obscured the fact that local news has been in a serious crisis for a long time. Its partisan appeals compound a years-long economic collapse with a crisis of trust.

Any discussion of local news starts with the decline of print journalism. In June of 1990, there were nearly half a million people employed in the newspaper industry; in March of 2016, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that there were 183,000—a decline of nearly 60 percent. Many of those jobs moved to the internet and television, but the decline has been acutely felt in small and medium-sized markets, many of which are no longer served with reliable print journalism. Those that are often get little original reporting, with newspapers instead dutifully regurgitating dispatches from local law enforcement.

