Fact check: How do conservative-leaning local news stations compare to liberal-leaning ones in terms of audience share in 2025?

1. A bold claim: conservatives dominate online local-news followings — what the partisan source says and how strong it is

The most direct claim that conservative-leaning local news stations lead in audience share comes from a September 5, 2025 article which states that conservative content accounts for 82% of followers across major platforms and that nine of the top ten most-followed shows are conservative ^[1]. That piece presents an unequivocal narrative of conservative dominance online, but it is a single partisan source making a broad numerical claim about "total followers" and "top shows" without releasing the underlying methodology in the provided analysis. The claim is precise in percentage but stands isolated from corroborating industry or academic data in the materials supplied ^[1].

2. Industry studies: local TV news is widely valued and has massive reach, but avoids partisan audience splits

Multiple items from the Television Bureau of Advertising (TVB) and related industry reporting emphasize that local TV news achieves higher daily impressions than many streaming platforms and major cable events and that 95% of Americans value local news on their local stations (p1_s3, ^[2]–p3_s3). These documents quantify the general reach and marketplace importance of local broadcast news and show its competitive strength versus national or streaming content. However, they do not break down viewership or digital followers by political leaning, leaving a substantive gap between reach data and partisan-audience claims ^{[2] [3]}.

3. Independent context: declines and shifts in local-news ecosystems without partisan audience metrics

Several supplied analyses discuss the broader decline or stressors affecting local newsrooms and circulation figures, outlining structural trends that influence audiences but do not provide direct partisan comparisons ^{[4] [5] [6]}. Those pieces underscore that local news faces institutional challenges that could reshape who consumes local reporting and how, yet the supplied materials stop short of producing an ideological audience-share metric. This means any assertion about conservative versus liberal local-station audience share cannot be validated from these contextual sources alone (p2_s1–p2_s3).

4. Reconciling the partisan numeric claim with neutral reach data: plausible explanations and persisting gaps

The discrepancy between the partisan claim of 82% conservative followers and industry materials showing broad local-news reach may be partly explained by differences in measurement: platform-followers and social engagement versus linear TV viewership and daily impressions ^{[1] [3]}. The partisan figure likely references social media followership and specific program followings, whereas TVB emphasizes broadcast impressions and audience valuation. Because these metrics capture different audience behaviors and the supplied datasets lack crosswalks or standardized definitions, the two kinds of evidence cannot be combined into a single definitive statement about partisan audience share ^{[1] [2]}.

5. Consequences for interpretation: what readers, advertisers, and policymakers should note

Given the evidence, stakeholders should treat the partisan dominance claim as an unverified platform-specific assertion while recognizing that local TV news retains substantial market importance per independent industry reporting (p1_s3, ^[2]–p3_s3). Advertisers and policymakers relying on accurate audience segmentation need data that is both methodologically transparent and comparable across platforms; the current supplied sources highlight local-news reach but do not provide the transparent partisan segmentation that would be required to guide decisions confidently ^{[5] [3]}.

6. Bottom line and where better data are needed to settle the question

The materials support two facts: that a partisan outlet claims overwhelming conservative advantage in online followers ^[1], and that independent industry studies document large, nonpartisan local TV reach and audience valuation but do not supply ideology-based market shares (p1_s3, ^[2]–p3_s3). To resolve the question definitively, investigators must obtain transparent, recent studies that standardize metrics across social platforms and linear broadcasting and that disclose sampling and classification methods; none of the supplied analyses provide that cross-validated partisan audience-share data (p1_s2, ^[4]–p2_s3).