  This paper examines the diffusion of media slant, specifically how partisan
content from national cable news affects local newspapers in the U.S.,
2005-2008. We use a text-based measure of cable news slant trained on content
from Fox News Channel (FNC), CNN, and MSNBC to analyze how local newspapers
adopt FNC's slant over CNN/MSNBC's. Our findings show that local news becomes
more similar to FNC content in response to an exogenous increase in local FNC
viewership. This shift is not limited to borrowing from cable news, but rather,
local newspapers' own content changes. Further, cable TV slant polarizes local
news content.
