Having experienced living in East TN now, the news exposure difference is night and day.
In Middle TN, Nashville news stations broadcast basically from southern KY to the AL border and from Dickson to Cookville. It's a HUGE coverage area and it's almost entirely focused on Nashville.
In East TN, there seems to be much smaller coverage areas. Knoxville news covers Knoxville and the surrounding counties one or two deep, and doesn't include Chattanooga or the Tri-cities area. I imagine Chattanooga is much the same, not sure what it's like in your corner of the state.
When I lived in Philly, the news was very Philly-centric and barely covered the adjacent counties which means just a handful of counties in SE PA and a couple in NJ.
When I lived in Tampa, the coverage was a little bigger, from like New Port Richie down to Sarasota and then from the coast over to Lakeland. But it's still a much smaller coverage than what Nashville has.
All that to say that Middle TN is VERY Nashville focused, but also if you look at the reach that Nashville has it kind of makes sense, many, many, many people drive from 2+ counties and more than an hour each way every day to work in Nashville. It's unique in my experience which isn't limited but not vast either.
I live in Milwaukee. I know a guy who drove down from Sheboygan to Brookfield for his job. That is 68 minutes to go 69 miles. Sheboyan is halfway from Milwaukee to Green Bay on I-43. Going north from Milwaukee, it is Milwaukee County, Ozaukee County (AKA Oz), and then Sheboygan County. Going west from Milwaukee, you cross into Waukesha County to get to Brookfield, so that is traveling 3 counties to get to work.
Plenty of people now work in Chicago and live in Kenosha, WI. That is traveling at least 2 counties because Lake County in Illinois is between Kenosha and Cook County. Some of the them can ride the Metra train from Kenosha to Chicago. We have 7 Amtrak trains a day that run from Milwaukee to Chicago and back. It is the busiest Amtrak rail line not on the East Coast. Before COVID-19, there was talk of putting a third train on the rails to make it 10 trips a day each way.
My sister used to live in New Port Richey. The Tampa TV news would cover what happened in her little town of 15,000 people that are 16 feet above sea level. I have been on that 45 to 50 minute, 38 mile drive too many times. The Tampa newspaper had a big series about pro wrestlers when I was there visiting. A lot of them, like Hulk Hogan and John Cena, live in the Tampa area,
brother!
Chicago and Milwaukee media, 90 miles apart, tend to ignore each other. We like it that way! The sports fans hate each other. The only two Blackhawks fans that lived in Milwaukee were both transplants from Chicago. One guy was married to a woman from Milwaukee. Let me emphasize that word
WAS!
I lived in Dayton and Cincinnati. Their TV signals overlap because their downtowns are 48 miles away. Cincinnati had a lot of TV towers north of their downtown and Dayton had several south of their downtown, so the broadcast distances were more like 40 to 45 miles. My friend from high school and college used to live on Chickasaw Street in Cincinnati. That tower from the opening of
WKRP in Cincinnati was just beyond the south end of his block. (I used to ask him if he had to turn on the gas to fry an egg or just remove it from the shell?) That tower is gone, but 2 TV stations are located there now with a new modern looking tower.