TV giant known for rightwing disinformation doubles down on its national news agenda

Sinclair, one of the largest owners of US television stations, has established itself as an influential player in the conservative movement by using trusted local news channels to spread disinformation and manipulated video of Joe Biden, media analysts say.

The company, which gained notoriety in 2018 for requiring local anchors across the country to read the same segment, has since created a national news show that produces stories distributed to its stations – often at the expense of local news coverage, the experts say.

As local journalism continues to decline, that formula could have an especially big impact on the upcoming presidential election when swing voters may then base their decision on fears over exaggerated problems.

“When you stress a story the way Sinclair does, say on immigration, and you don’t look at the numbers and you don’t reflect on what has been going on, that is different than a news story. That is a political talking point,” said Anne Nelson, journalist and author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.

While local newspapers have seen their subscription and advertising numbers decline significantly over the last couple decades, their TV counterparts remain the most common source of local news – outside of personal contacts – and their advertising revenue has remained relatively stable, according to the Pew Research Center

Sinclair owns or operates 185 TV stations in 86 markets. When the company buys a station, its coverage of national politics increases significantly, as does a shift to the right, according to a 2018 American Political Science Review journal study . The authors conducted the study by using software to analyze news show transcripts.

That same year, the company drew scrutiny for forcing anchors at 200 stations around the country to read a script that warned of “fake news”, as Trump often did, and stated: “We’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.”

Jessica Bellucci, a spokesperson for Sinclair, declined the Guardian’s request for comment.

The company established The National Desk , which it describes as providing “a comprehensive, commentary-free look” at national and regional news in 2021.

Related: Meet the election operators – the influential individuals shaping Trump’s White House bid

In previous election cycles, the company distributed segments from people such as Boris Epshteyn, a Trump adviser, labeled as commentary. “This time around, it’s branded as The National Desk, which sounds a lot more innocuous, and feels a lot more like news,” said Pam Vogel, senior adviser at Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media watchdog group.

Notably, older generations are also much more likely to watch television news than young adults.

“We have these older Americans who tend to also be the ones most likely to vote, the ones most politically active, and they are now being exposed to this very partisan coverage of political events,” said Josh McCrain, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Utah who co-authored a study on Sinclair’s impact on national politics.

For example, the company distributed stories to its local news websites based on videos manipulated by the Republican National Committee to, in one case, make it look as though President Biden soiled himself .

“It’s being distributed through the lens of these trusted local outlets that are branded with ABC, CBS, NBC – media brands that people do not view in the same category as a Fox News – but if you look at a lot of what they are covering, it’s a lot of the issues you might find Trump talk about in a stump speech,” said Judd Legum, author of the Popular Information newsletter.

Sinclair, like Trump, also presents crime as a grave threat, Vogel said, despite violent crime decreasing significantly in recent years.

“Local news in general tends to cover a lot of crime stories – that’s not specific to Sinclair,” said Vogel. But Sinclair stations are “producing in-depth reporting that is really focused on local crime in a way that feels like fear-mongering or promoting crisis-level feelings out of viewers”.

Sinclair stations also promote misleading concerns about migrants committing crime. In June, Fox-28 Savannah , a Sinclair-owned station, ran a National Desk story that reported, without attribution: “New government data shows that the number of migrants with criminal records crossing the border has spiked in the previous three years.”

The story mentions a 12-year-old girl who was killed by undocumented immigrants from Venezuela.

An obviously horrific story, it’s not necessarily representative of undocumented immigrants, who are much less likely to be convicted of crimes than native-born Americans. As demonstrated by the recent decrease in violent crime, there is no correlation with increased immigration, according to a number of studies .

“It’s fine to say immigration is a concern, but then you look at what the current reality is, right? That’s reporting,” said Nelson.

Nelson also noted that left-leaning news organizations do not always devote enough coverage to important stories, such as the criminal charges against Hunter Biden.

“I would say some of the cable programs on the left don’t give it full coverage,” Nelson said, adding that “they tend to have a few more facts salted into their coverage” than rightwing outlets such as Sinclair.

And while the media analysts were critical of Sinclair’s reporting on the RNC clips of Biden and its repetition of a Wall Street Journal report questioning his mental fitness, the president’s debate performance last week sparked fears among Democrats that perhaps he was actually not capable of a second term.

Vogel and Legum both said it didn’t make them rethink their criticism of Sinclair, as the company still ran RNC clips that were manipulated or taken out of context.

“My belief is that questions about Biden’s age are very legitimate; I think some of them were on display … That doesn’t mean, as Sinclair has repeatedly suggested, that he soiled himself at a D-day event,” Legum said after the debate. “I don’t think that Sinclair has been handling [the clips] in a responsible way.”