Today, it is common for political websites to pull stories from local news outlets so they can write about them to promote their political agendas. To avoid political soapboxing and the 20-year rule, I’ll give a generic example:
Person X says or does something political.
A local news outlet near where Person X lives writes a story about what they did.
A political news website finds Person X’s story and writes a new article about it so the site can promote their agenda.
In 20th century USA (prior to 1997), was it common for political newspapers or other journalism outlets to pull local stories to promote their agenda, or is this a newer invention because of the internet and social media?
Also as a reminder, no political soapboxing or post 1997 events.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "pull." In the 20th century, newspapers subscribed to (a variety of) wire services for news content -- the Associated Press is still around, as is UPI (United Press International, formerly United Press Associations), though UPI is a bit more of a niche now. There's also AFP, Reuters, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, etc.; but the AP is really the only (American) general interest one still standing.
Newspapers often also shared content within other papers within an ownership group, so that they could fill space and cover things that they may not have been able to otherwise -- for example, a regional newspaper group might have been able to pool resources to cover a big event, say a political convention, without having to rely on AP or UPI to hopefully write stories of local interest.
You would also see instances in which local papers would rewrite wire stories to "localize" them, or make them of local interest, sometimes with a local byline and sometimes crediting "wire reports." Rewriting a story from elsewhere wasn't unheard of, but the era of extreme partisanship in newspapers was really a 19th century and early 20th century phenomenon -- by mid-century, while newspapers certainly had opinion sections, most at least attempted to play it straight whenever possible in their news sections. This of course excludes the explicitly political newsletter and periodical press; I'm talking here mostly about large metropolitan dailies. (If you want a mid-century source for this, check out Frank Luther Mott's American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 250 years 1690 to 1960, which is basically a narrative of how the bad old party press became the gloriously "objective" newspapers of the 1950s. Mott revised the textbook, first published in 1940, continuously until his death in 1964 -- he was professor and dean of the journalism school at the University of Missouri, which has substantial influence in the field.)
What changed, of course, with the Internet age is that it became much easier to find and republish content than it was in the old days of scanning the wire summaries and waiting for AP or UPI to move content.