Newspaper acquisition as an element of a conservative agenda

 Nothing new here, really.  It's been an issue since the beginning of newspapers.  And sometimes there are progressives involved (like New York City's PM newspaper in the 1940s).

The Baltimore Sun has just been acquired by the Chairman of the Sinclair Media Group ("Baltimore Sun Media sold to Maryland business leader," Sun), which is a national chain of conservative oriented television changes where they "force" individual stations to carry particularly slanted conservative stories, and a conservative media show, Sheryl Atkisson ("Local television station news: Scripps WCPO in Cincinnati vs. Sinclair Broadcasting Corp." 2018).

He's already criticized the current paper ("New Baltimore Sun owner insults staff, says paper should mimic Fox45," Baltimore Banner).  The Baltimore Banner is an online media source, owned by Stewart Bainum, who created Choice Hotels and an assisted living group, and was an elected official.  He attempted to buy the paper a few years ago but was unsuccessful.

Like people before him who crashed and burned, he says that more local coverage will spur more subscriptions and interest.  The fact is with the Internet, printed newspaper subscriptions have dropped by 75%.  Combined with the decline in local and national advertising, printed newspapers are a shadow of what they once were.

The sale includes the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, as well as local weekly newspapers in Greater Baltimore.

2.  In Alabama, to shape discourse on utility regulation, Alabama Power has created a news service ("How an Alabama utility wields influence by financing news," Guardian).  As newspapers reduce staff, such articles are increasingly run as is, despite the potential slant.

Plus the company bought the Birmingham Times, a newspaper focused on the black community.  From the article:

What’s happening in Alabama is an example of how special interests have taken advantage of the diminishing reach and influence of shrinking mainstream newsrooms in the US. In their place have sprung up fake “pink slime” news sites operated by political interests; a utility that secretly created news outlets to attack its critics; and a Florida publisher who accepts payments for positive coverage. 

This investigation into power companies infiltrating local media follows Floodlight’s revelation earlier this month about how utilities wield influence among civil rights groups. 

In the last decade, nearly a dozen local reporters and editors were hired to staff the two Alabama news outlets. A Floodlight review of the content since the utility founded the Alabama News Center in 2015 shows it publishes overwhelmingly positive stories about the power company. 

Coverage of the utility by the Birmingham Times, which was funded with money from Alabama Power’s charitable arm the Alabama Power Foundation, consists of reprinted stories from the News Center and the utility’s own press releases.

When I worked at Center for Science in the Public Interest decades ago, it published two reports, Marketing Booze to Blacks and Marketing Disease to Hispanics, focused on how corporate advertising especially by tobacco and alcohol products companies in minority media was used to push an anti-health agenda.

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Separately, the Washington Post is cutting staff which disproportionately is affecting coverage of local news ("Introducing Out of Ink," Washington City Paper).  In the past few years, the paper eliminated the special zoned weekly local news sections ("One more blow against community media: Washington Post drops Thursday "county" news special sections," 2017) and shut down the independent from the paper suburban weekly chain it owned ("The ongoing tragedy of dying print media, the latest being community newspapers in Montgomery and Prince George's Counties, Maryland," 2015).

The paper continues to focus on online subscriptions, which is fine, but a national and international audience doesn't care much about regionally-relevant local news. Since online subscribers have shrunk during the Biden presidency, the paper is short of money.