Outlet profile

WRAL (Associated Press wire)

U.S. center-left

Owned byCapitol Broadcasting Company, privately held by the Fletcher-Goodmon family (fourth-generation descendants of founder A.J. Fletcher)

FundingAdvertising-based — television broadcast advertising and digital advertising; Capitol Broadcasting Company's diversified portfolio of media and entertainment assets provides additional financial support

On the administrationmixed

Background

WRAL-TV launched on December 15, 1956, as a Raleigh broadcast station under Capitol Broadcasting Company, which A.J. Fletcher had founded in 1937. The station is among the few major-market television stations still held by the same founding family — now four generations of the Fletcher-Goodmon line — with no outside ownership changes in its history. During the 1960s and early 1970s, WRAL aired more than 2,700 'Viewpoint' editorials that carried a distinctly conservative tone under A.J. Fletcher's direction. Over subsequent decades, the station moved away from overt editorializing and toward mainstream local broadcast news. Today it serves the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill-Fayetteville market as its NBC affiliate and operates a high-traffic digital news site carrying both original local reporting and Associated Press wire stories. Media bias analysts place WRAL at left-center (Media Bias/Fact Check) to center (AllSides, Ground News), with all major raters assigning it high or very-high marks for factual accuracy. In 2025–2026, WRAL has published fact-checks on Trump administration claims — including the February 2026 State of the Union — finding some assertions exaggerated while also checking Democratic counterpoints, a pattern consistent with a center-to-left-center outlet that applies journalistic scrutiny across the partisan spectrum.

Sources

Profile compiled 2026-06-29; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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