The Right-Wing Media Machine, Part 2: How Does the Machine Work?

Stat: The largest pro-Trump Twitter botnet identified during the 2016 election contained 944 bots, compared with 264 in the largest pro-Clinton botnet, a roughly five-to-one imbalance in the campaign’s final days. (Oxford Internet Institute, Computational Propaganda Research Project)

I started my career in local media with an NBC affiliate, WITN-TV. I remember the diligence paid to ensuring our newsroom wasn’t combined with, or didn't appear to cater to, our advertisers. Today, that is no longer a problem. With some news outlets, it is almost expected. When advertisers are allowed to influence the news, the community is left in the dark. We see this happening with the right-wing media machine - and this is a big reason they are significant and effective.

In Part 1, I traced how today’s conservative media network grew out of 1980s talk radio, through G. Gordon Liddy’s era and into today’s podcast landscape. Knowing where it came from is important. Understanding how it actually operates day to day, how the pieces connect, how the money flows, and how the message stays so tightly coordinated is what actually matters for anyone trying to make sense of the news cycle. So let’s break it into three parts: connection, money, and narrative control.

A. How Do They Connect?

The network isn’t one company; it’s a web of syndication deals, shared guests, and cross-promotion. A single opinion or talking point can start on a podcast, get repeated on talk radio the same afternoon, show up on a cable panel that night, and appear in a local news script the next morning, because in many cases, the same company owns the local station or licenses the same syndicated content.

Sinclair Broadcast Group is the clearest example of this at the local level. It’s the largest owner of local TV stations in the country, and its reach has come close to the FCC’s ownership cap on its own. Sinclair has drawn scrutiny for sending must-run segments and centrally produced scripts to its local affiliates, meaning a viewer watching what looks like an independent local newscast may actually be watching content written at headquarters and voiced by an anchor they trust.

B. How Is the Money Made?

At its core, this is a business. Talk radio syndication is cheap for stations to run, since one host’s show can fill hours of programming across hundreds of markets without each station needing its own local talent. So let’s stop there: producing the news costs money. The overhead, equipment, and salaries are all condensed with one broadcast distributed to other outlets. This maximizes content and cuts costs, a major expense for local stations. Combine that efficiency with targeted messaging, and you have the magic that makes this work.

Let’s break down how the money is made:

Cable news: Sells advertising against a loyal, predictable audience. Local broadcast groups bring in serious money. Sinclair alone reported about $5.9 billion in revenue in 2020.

Podcasts and YouTube channels: These vehicles add a newer way to earn. Hosts sell subscriptions, read ads themselves, and move merch, and it all pays off more when people come back every day. Whatever the format, an audience that sticks with one source is worth more than one that shops around.

The money is recycled in the machine. Loyal viewers/listeners buy products from advertisers and subscriptions to the shows. The outlets keep broadcasting carefully curated messaging that supports their narratives. The outlets reuse the professionally produced content by sharing it throughout the network (machine), stretching production budgets and reducing overhead.

C. How Do They Spin the Narrative?

The most sophisticated layer is automation. Research from Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Project examined the 2016 election and found that the largest identified pro-Trump Twitter botnet included 944 automated accounts, compared with 264 in the largest identified pro-Clinton botnet, and that pro-Trump bots outnumbered pro-Clinton bots roughly five to one in the final days of the race. At times during the campaign, more than a quarter of tweets using hashtags like #MAGA came from accounts researchers classified as heavily automated.

Bots don’t need to convince anyone directly. I wrote a blog about bots last year that lays out their function. Simply, their job is to make a message look more popular than it actually is, to push a hashtag to trend, and to create the appearance of grassroots momentum, so real people join in believing they’re joining something that’s already widely supported. Mixed with similar talking points moving across radio, cable, and local news on the same day, the effect is a narrative that feels inevitable and organic. The truth is its early traction was manufactured. The popularity is false.

Put the three pieces together:

1. Cross-owned local stations

2. Syndication economics

3. Automated amplification

When you combine these factors, you get a system built to move a single message through as many channels as possible, as fast as possible. What does that system actually do to political narratives? How does it handle misinformation and lies? What does it do to the public trust? Read part 3 of the blog to see where we’re headed.

Sources:

1. CNN Money, “Sinclair’s TV deal would be good for Trump”

2. IEEE Spectrum, “How Political Campaigns Weaponize Social Media Bots”

Thomas Y. Lynch