Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/business/media/sinclair-news-anchors-script.html

393 290 8 years ago

I'm not clear why this is a problem. A corporation asked its broadcasters to make a statement on fake news. This statement sounds similar to others made by other corporate owned networks. Viewers are invited to comment on the website.

alistairSH2• 8 years ago

The problem is the corporation. Sinclair has it's own political agenda. Forcing anchors across the US to recite something is bad enough, but when that something is of questionable truth, and orchestrated to minimuze Sinclair's own propensity to push its right-ist agenda, it's downright scary.

robotrout4• 8 years ago

Local stations are the least of our problems. 232 executives control news to 277 million Americans (from 2012). This was what I hoped the article was about.

http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-...

ThbTs4wbXC9Qjv• 8 years ago

I'm FAR more concerned about national stations like CNN than local Sinclair stations. Just anti-american agenda based news non-stop. Some of us happen to like the country we live in.

0x445442• 8 years ago

Yeah, just about as scary as GE, Disney, Time Warner et al. pushing their left wing agendas via CNN, MSNBC/NBC and ABC.

See, everyone can play this game in the Postmodernist world.

rambojazz2• 8 years ago

- people trust local media

- a single corporation owns a fuckton of those local stations

- the same corporation writes a script to broadcast on every station

- media hosts or journalists can't say "no". Do the job or lose your job. They're not free to report news without bias

- you don't know everything about everything, so you're inclined to trust the news because they're supposed to be neutral and report facts

- ultimately you internalize a biased opinion that was poured down onto you by the will of a handful of shareholders

Why can't you see the problem?

Consultant3245210• 8 years ago

Not the person you're replying to, but I also have a hard time seeing the problem. Or rather, I can see the problem, but this is how I would've expected news to have been done for decades. I grew up when there was only 4 TV channels and no internet. I would have assumed CBS (or its parent) would have controlled all the CBS affiliates in this way in the 80s. NBC would do the same, etc.

irrational2• 8 years ago

"They're not free to report news without bias... they're supposed to be neutral and report facts"

I know I sound cynical, but does any thinking person actually believe that? That strikes me as incredibly naive.

steamer25• 8 years ago

It's ironic (cue pedants) because they're denouncing one-sided presentations that advance a particular agenda while using a facade of ostensibly independent-minded locals that are actually mouthpieces for their remote overlords.

It betrays that their indignation isn't so much over dangers to democracy as it is their loosening grip on the ability to frame the discussion of any given day.

https://youtu.be/TRBppdC1h_Y

https://youtu.be/0ljI-isM0bg

pdx• 8 years ago

Except they're not "mouth pieces". Local journalists are much more independent than national ones. This instance by Sinclair of attempting to combat the national news broadcasters was a David vs Goliath attempt, and they are coming out of it much worse than David did.

digitaltrees7• 8 years ago

Systematically destroying the trust in all other sources of truth so that you are the only source of truth is a dangerous tactic that is used to consolidate power in the minds of a population. This argument needs to be called out any time its used and by anyone that uses it. I am on the left, if any democrat used this argument to gain power I would call them out.

wu-ikkyu6• 8 years ago

Isn't this pretty much the case for all corporate media? The narrative is set from the top down, and if anyone strays too far outside the Overton Window, they're punished. Example: Phil Donahue getting fired from MSNBC for speaking against the war in Iraq.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue#MSNBC_program

SanFranManDan• 8 years ago

I think the point was that it was true for the national corporate media, but the local stations were somewhat protected until ajit pai allowed Sinclair to start sucking all of them up. Now the problems with MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, etc will pour into the local news stations as well. All local news and national news will be controlled by highly concentrated oligopolies. These past years we are seeing much more concentration of something that was already concentrated.

SonicSoul• 8 years ago

Phil Donahue was not a news anchor. What makes this case different is that this is scripted material posing as real local news as part of basic cable package. Most people will not treat this as crafted message from a corporation, but actual news.

wu-ikkyu6• 8 years ago

Isn't most corporate cable news a scripted message read from a teleprompter?

alexandercrohde• 8 years ago

A lot of people believe that, but it's far from proven in the general case. There are some proven examples of the US government influencing news (at home and abroad), there are clearly advertiser influences, there are political influencers (e.g. Fox News) on partisan channels.

But I haven't seen evidence for it as the norm. Obviously this piece was published by the New York Times, for example.

wu-ikkyu6• 8 years ago

I haven't seen evidence for it as the norm.

You might like Spin, a 1995 documentary composed of unauthorized behind the scenes footage of the political maneuverings of newscasters and politicians.

https://youtu.be/PlJkgQZb0VU

fncypants2• 8 years ago

This message was tailored to push the "fake news" narrative of the current administration under the guise of journalistic integrity. It is designed to engender absolute distrust in non-Sinclair media, which given Sinclair's enormous market share[0] is unwarranted and harmful to the democracy.

Why would this be classified by Sinclair a MUST run segment for likely one reason? Easy: to curry favor with the White House to clear the path for further consolidation. Trump speaks glowingly of Sinclair,[1] despite what others consider to be anti-competitive acquisitions and mergers and detrimental to a healthy free press.[2] Yet, Trump has taken action to prevent CNN from merging with Time Warner which is currently being tried in a courtroom.[3] The difference is that CNN's news reporting is very unfavorable to this White House.

This is not how a democracy remains healthy, or, really, how one continues to exist.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2017/05/07/sin... [1] https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/02/trump-defends-sinc... [2] https://www.vox.com/2017/5/15/15598270/sinclair-broadcast-im... [3] http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/21/media/trump-comments-att-tim...

fwgwgwgch2• 8 years ago

Isn't that the entire model since long of the owners of multiple local news channels? It's a running joke on reddit since so many years.

portofcall2• 8 years ago

The problem is that they’re the single largest television broadcaster.

Headquartered in Hunt Valley, Maryland, the company is the largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations, and largest by total coverage; owning or operating a total of 193 stations across the country (233 after all currently proposed sales are approved) in over 100 markets (covering 40% of American households), many of which are located in the South and Midwest.

yborg• 8 years ago

With the shift to the various 21st century streaming platforms, broadcast TV in its traditional form is rapidly becoming the bastion of the elderly. The average traditional broadcast news viewer is 50+[1] so very soon Sinclair will be dominating retirement homes everywhere in America. It's a demographic that will literally die out from under them, and seems like a poor long-term investment.

[1] http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/

nimbius• 8 years ago

It is important to reinforce the wholesomeness, and trustworthiness, of your brand or product when that product faces the significant risk of potential legislative regulation in light of growing aversion to its decades-long embrace of lies, manipulation, and 'fake news' in the pursuit of ratings and shareholder value.

Sinclair has taken up the mantle of PR Firm to engage in some preemptive damage control. 15 years ago all you had to say was "Fair and Balanced."

vinhboy• 8 years ago

You are way way way way too optimistic... It is clear by the current state of our politics that there is no repercussion for lying.

The fact that Sinclair has been growing is evidence of that.

Ajedi32• 8 years ago

FYI, the article seems to be linking to a reupload of the original video for some reason.

This is the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI

mandelbulb• 8 years ago

Nah, they've just linked to another upload -- if you want to know the account, the link under "social media" points to the same video as the embed one.

Besides, the original is Deadspin's article[1]. The video was downloaded and posted on Youtube. The Reddit user said that oneself. Deadspin, of course, also got the idea and news elsewhere, e.g., the linked ThinkProgress video in the article.

[1] https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/how-americas-largest-local...

nsxwolf• 8 years ago

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

robotrout4• 8 years ago

I agree. 232 people control the news that 277 million americans are allowed to see. ([1] from 2012). Many of us have been pounding this drum for a long time, including Trump himself. I think it is this control at a national level that the Sinclair news anchors were being told to warn people about, but the NYT has flipped the narrative on them, and now they're the bad guys. Genius, but unfortunate.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-...

losteric6• 8 years ago

Many of us have been pounding this drum for a long time, including Trump himself.

Can you cite that? It sounds like prime material for Reddit's /r/TrumpCriticizesTrump/

maxerickson4• 8 years ago

Your take doesn't jibe with Sinclair requiring their stations to air Boris Epshteyn and his, uh, "analysis".

prolikewhoa3• 8 years ago

Agreed. This has been no secret and a lot of people have absolutely been pounding this drum for a long time.

Bernie talking about it in 1988 as mayor of Burlington: https://youtu.be/KIQ_Kj7uBeg

IngvarLynn• 8 years ago

It is not "are allowed to see" but "chose to consume". This whole "fake news" jazz is for the wrong reason.

black6• 8 years ago

Or our constitutional republic, as the case may be.

astrodust2• 8 years ago

The United States is a monarchy now, you just don't realize it yet.

chc3• 8 years ago

A constitutional republic is a type of democracy. Trying to draw a distinction there is beyond splitting hairs.

TallGuyShort• 8 years ago

It's about as dangerous as Twitter spam. If people's votes are swaying based on the trash that is cable news and fake Twitter accounts, I'm not sure we had much hope for government-by-the-people to begin with.

HugoDaniel• 8 years ago

They most likely had their speeches written by the same person/people/company. It goes like that in most countries: a big media outlet sells pre-made news/opinions to most newspapers which they then only adapt slightly and keep most of the taglines and significant phrasing.

sp332• 8 years ago

The script came from Sinclair Broadcast Group, the country’s largest broadcaster, which owns or operates 193 television stations.

Last week, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a copy of the speech and reported that employees at a local news station there, KOMO, were unhappy about the script. CNN reported on it on March 7 and said Scott Livingston, the senior vice president of news for Sinclair, had read almost the exact same speech for a segment that was distributed to outlets a year ago.

Someone12342• 8 years ago

It was the same exact speech. The only variance was "we at [TV station name]."

KirinDave5• 8 years ago

Hugo. Please, PLEASE read and watch the material before commenting here.

fwgwgwgch2• 8 years ago

Why is the part about Sinclair news reporting on "Islamic terror" and "Trump support" singled out. Do they not report on anything else at all? Or is reporting on both this stuff by default a wrong thing to do?

losteric6• 8 years ago

Sinclair does not report on anything. Local TV stations do their own journalism, but Sinclair owns the station and can order the local broadcasters to read scripts.

Those topics are likely the only ones with concrete evidence.

ahoy2• 8 years ago

Sinclair are a media company that owns local news stations. For the past few years, they've been feeding "must run" content (in the form of pre-recorded segments or scripts for anchors to read) to those news stations to be presented along side news.

Those segments are, overwhelmingly, right-wing talking points.

rhacker• 8 years ago

Seems like we need to get more people cord-cut immediately...

eligundry• 8 years ago

Youtube recommends far more dangerous stuff.

x2202• 8 years ago

So that they can be manipulated by internet media monopolies instead?

MrPresident• 8 years ago

Why is this news? Conan covered this years ago. https://mic.com/articles/77721/watch-conan-o-brien-bust-loca...

Someone12342• 8 years ago

Because Sinclair just purchased more TV stations, so many in fact that it was banned under previous administrations at the FCC. At the start of 2017, the FCC just rewrote the rules allowing Sinclair to own a large swath of the US's local news capacity.

In many markets they're the sole source of local news.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-07/sinclair-...

jandrese2• 8 years ago

They're also the most likely candidate to pick up the pieces when iHeartRadio goes bankrupt. They're going to have the strongest propaganda outlet since the times of Hearst newspapers. This is an abject failure of the FCC.

Finnucane• 8 years ago

Because it's still a problem and it's just getting worse?

ilamont2• 8 years ago

There are many threats to democracy, but this is not one of them.

Audience numbers for local TV news (not to mention national TV news) is shrinking across the U.S. Younger people in particular will not sit down to watch a 30 minute talking-heads newscast stuffed to the gills with car, telecom, and insurance ads.

See: https://www.poynter.org/news/new-pew-study-says-local-tv-new...

ahoy2• 8 years ago

Old people watch more local news and vote at higher rates than any other demographic group.

mschuster912• 8 years ago

Old people [...] vote at higher rates than any other demographic group.

Now that one is bound to change. Young people, both in the US and abroad, are discovering the powers of social media and organize to advance their causes. Trump with his backwards, racist and misogynistic rhetoric and his politics mostly serving the old, white, male population provides a perfect enemy figure to rally against.

Somewhere on Reddit I have read that from now until the elections this fall there will be 4 million young people turning old enough to vote (sounds about right, given ~4M births per year in the US). That's a massive block of voters and most of them will either vote Democrat or some of the fringe parties.

ilamont2• 8 years ago

Yet the Pew data shows sharp drops in those demographics getting news from TV, too ... from 72%-64% in just one year for adults aged 50-64.

wwweston• 8 years ago

Voting audience at the right margins across the right states might be just as important or more important than general audience numbers.

Young people famously just don't consistently get out to the polls in the way that much older people do. There might be a day when TV news just doesn't matter (it's certainly mattered little to me since sometime in the 90s), but it might take until the generation that grew up with the rise of the internet is approaching retirement.

dguaraglia8• 8 years ago

I think that state-sponsored propaganda is a threat to democracy, no matter how small the audience is. Just look at what's happening in countries like Turkey, where authoritarian figureheads weren't taken seriously because they were "fringe".

WhompingWindows2• 8 years ago

In my eyes, this is a clear set/spike play. A huge corporation, enabled by their corrupt allies in the FCC, buy up hundreds of "local" stations. They then use the local cred/reputation of these stations to suggest that fake news is rampant on other sources (not controlled by Sinclair). They then tilt the dialogue nation-wide. Meanwhile, the average citizen is unaware that their trusted local anchor is bought/sold, they lack education and resources to educate themselves, and they are pushed further towards whatever dialogue the Sinclair executives are paid to push them towards.

Does anyone from either side of the aisle consider a national corporation owning local stations and forcing scripts down their throat a good thing for the marketplace of ideas?

meri_dian4• 8 years ago

How is that any different from major news organizations like CNN with a national reach clearly pushing biased anti-Trump news constantly?

It's funny: Trump attacks CNN for being fake, biased news, then CNN responds by focusing all of their negative reporting on Trump, becoming exactly what Trump says they are. People would have had much more respect for CNN if they had stuck to the middle path in the face of Trump's insults.

We should not turn a blind eye towards some instances of bias in media simply because they reinforce our own values and beliefs.

nitrogen• 8 years ago

Instead of derailing with "you too", can we focus on one thing at a time?

National news programs are a separate issue from secretly biased local news.

dguaraglia8• 8 years ago

Well, for one: CNN isn't getting a sweet new FCC head honcho to shape policy to benefit them. Second: do you understand the difference between a free press and a propaganda machine, right? One goes against the government's views, the other one pushes it.

pasbesoin• 8 years ago

CNN is a network. It is not station ownership.

Stations have obligations in return for their licensing. Some of which require them to serve the public good. Local newscasting falls in that category.

Sinclair is turning that "public good" into propaganda. This is counter to the license terms. At least, in my opinion. Maybe we'll see that addressed, in court, at some point.

There are also marketshare caps, created to prevent this kind of bias from gaining dominance of the broadcast market. Sinclair has been lobbying and buying its way towards circumvention of those caps.

Numerous studies indicate that, with all the changes in media, many people still go to their local broadcast news station for their news, and that they have a higher level of trust in it than in other sources.

Arguably, when you turn on CNN or Fox -- networks, that cable and satellite providers can choose to carry along with however many other channels they want to sell you -- you know what you're getting.

This, by contrast, is a creeping menace of bias, masked as your trusted local news source. (And as other "public service" broadcasting. Whereas people reasonably argue that the demonstrated bias to one political agenda, as well as the masking of the source of said programming, is not "public service".)

mcphage• 8 years ago

It's funny: Trump attacks CNN for being fake, biased news, then CNN responds by focusing all of their negative reporting on Trump, becoming exactly what Trump says they are.

CNN reporting negatively on Trump doesn't make them "fake". He's a bad president and a bad leader; reporting on that means you're telling the truth. Fake mean lying, not reporting truth you don't want to hear.

gwbas1c2• 8 years ago

I'm disappointed that the above comment got so many downvotes. It's an important observation in the bigger context.

I used to get most of my news from CNN, and the amount of "bad" anti-trump editorials they publish really scared me. CNN has a lot of anti-Trump articles that take a trolling tone.

We (me and CNN) didn't vote for Trump, and we (me and CNN) don't like him, but that's no excuse for bad journalism. Part of a democracy is getting along when you loose the election.

thaumaturgy3• 8 years ago

Oh, it's more overt than that.

Ajit Pai has been rolling back FCC regulations preventing Sinclair from massively expanding its media empire. In exchange, with Pai acting as a go-between for Trump and Sinclair, Sinclair promised Trump that he'd get better media coverage. [1]

Reddit had a large thread about this video over the weekend. Most of the comments were the usual garbage, but there was some good stuff in there: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/88ll08/this_is_what...

[1] https://gist.github.com/shakna-israel/a5df6c9c70ccfce3ad3c27...

wang_li• 8 years ago

Does anyone from either side of the aisle consider a national corporation owning local stations and forcing scripts down their throat a good thing for the marketplace of ideas?

Is this like there being only 1 Facebook, 1 Google, and 1 Twitter, all of which have recently begun to "fact check" the content users put on their services?

I think it's important to have a broad dissemination of information about these kinds of things, but if all that is happening here is a targeted freakout because John Oliver did a story, then no thanks.

koheripbal• 8 years ago

The only reason this is getting so much press is because it was favorable to Trump. If we look at left leaning abuses of "news", it gets buried in downvotes and derided as "both sides".

If you really want to combat the problem, you need to attack the root of the problem - for-profit 'news' organizations.

There should be regulations around ownership and foreign funding of anything that labels itself "news" or "journalism".

fncypants2• 8 years ago

No for-profit news organizations? That don't take money in exchange for delivering consumers eyeballs to advertisers I presume?

I hope then that you subscribe to your public broadcasting stations (read: fund PBS and NPR news reporting--are you OK with that?) and have told your representatives to fund those organizations.

If not, then you're looking for something that cannot be achieved and will forever be moving the goalposts. Media in the US or anywhere else, even when it is best, has never been un-biased. But it has been more honest and fair.

thaumaturgy3• 8 years ago

Trump recently took DACA off the negotiating table, announcing it in a tweet, citing a Fox News & Friends segment on 'caravans' of inbound immigrants: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration/trump-say...

The President is watching this same garbage and making policy decisions based on it. Let that sink in for a moment.

robotrout4• 8 years ago

If you watched the state of the union, you know that Trump made a proposal about DACA that was such a huge compromise to the left, that much of his base raised hell. The left refused that compromise, and refused again, when he asked for DACA and the wall to be addressed in the latest spending bill. Since he has twice been rebuffed on his compromises, he's going the other way. That seems reasonable to me.

bradleyankrom8• 8 years ago

I don't think very many left-of-center people would agree with your assertion that it was a "huge" compromise. They wanted tens of billions of dollars for a symbolic wall, closing of several legal immigration processes, etc. There are several DACA fixes sitting in congress but Republican leadership refuses to bring any of them up for a vote.

dahdum8• 8 years ago

I was surprised Democrats didn’t compromise on that, I think they are too focused on making Trump fail at any cost.

I’m all for increased immigration and amnesty, but I’m not in support of open borders, so a compromise for increased border security sounded like good policy to me.

rtkwe• 8 years ago

Basically the opposite happened. There was a congressional compromise the would have given DACA and funding for the border wall then the White House came back demanding additional sweeping changes to legal immigration.

ModernMech13• 8 years ago

I remember Trump saying he would sign literally any immigration deal brought to him by a bipartisan group, and when they did what he asked he rejected it, thanks to Stephen Miller. Then Chuck Schumer basically told Trump to name how much he wanted for the wall, which Trump refused to do. Then the government shut down and Trump relished in blaming Democrats.

The left refused that compromise

Why was a compromised needed again? Every congressperson, R and D, when asked said they supported a permanent DACA fix. Why should Democrats be willing to compromise on something like lowering the number of legal immigrants admitted for something everyone claims they want. Why should the left compromise to fund a useless wall the President insists will be paid for by Mexico? Problem seems to be Republicans don't really want to admit they're in favor of deporting in all-but-legal-status Americans from their home land.

Since he has twice been rebuffed on his compromises, he's going the other way. That seems reasonable to me.

Sarcasm? That's what's known as cutting off your nose to spite your face, assuming trump was sincere at all about DACA in the first place, which is highly questionable.

dguaraglia8• 8 years ago

If you believe anything Trump says during a speech, then you are doing it wrong. Always look at the man's actions, instead of paying attention to his words.

rwoodley2• 8 years ago

That is not an accurate summary of what happened. Trump killed any possibility of compromise, insisting on extreme proposals once Congress started to act. Here are the details of what happened back in February on this because it is too long and complicated to summarize here: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/15/immigration-daca-s...

Who knows what Trump really wants? One day he says generous things about DACA, the next he wants to kill it. I think it depends whether he watched Fox news in the interim. Or spoke to Stephen Miller.

He did the same thing with gun legislation. Says promising things in front of the camera, but then kills anything meaningful after checking in with the NRA and/or Fox news.

rwoodley2• 8 years ago

Do we have to be on the left to think Trump is a nut? Does Trump own the right?

bradleyankrom8• 8 years ago

Also, Ds have tried to work directly with Trump to secure a solution for DACA and areas of agreement have been blown up every time by the Stephen Miller/John Kelly faction of the administration. The reality is that there will never be a DACA "compromise" or solution, other than complete dissolution and further ramping up of deportations, while Miller & Co. are in the WH.

digitaltrees7• 8 years ago

Didn't Democrats offer to fund the boarder wall in exchange for a DACA bill? What more compromise is there?

thrillgore• 8 years ago

What are my best and quickest options to legally expatriate out of the US?

yourapostasy• 8 years ago

In case your question was not a rhetorical device, or a troll, there are almost a dozen nations that enable US expatriates to stay indefinitely on non-work visas. Hang out in digital nomad forums and you will discover that with a few exceptions, most fund their lifestyle through remote work and do not declare to their host country their intention to remote work while on a non-work visa. Most nations aren't set up to handle the vagaries of remote work, anyways.

You sit in Thailand, contracted to a client headquartered in San Francisco, whose servers you solely work on sit in Montreal, and the team you work with offices in Berlin; if you try to go legal in such a situation, you will either quickly go broke on attorney, CPA and FX fees, the taxes every jurisdiction levies because there are no reciprocity agreements for many of those inter-relationships yet, or both. The situation is ugly even in supposed "streamlined" situations like NAFTA between the US and Canada; I've seen firms with offices in both nations, employees in both nations, and employees from one are still denied entering the other to do face-to-face work with co-workers, and it's gotten to such a ridiculous level that Legal just verbally signs off on a "don't ask don't tell" policy to declare upon entry that the visit is only for a (or series of) business meetings.

It's not difficult to perform the physical expatriation act. It's difficult to navigate the logistical tail of expatriation though, because movement of labor is still far more constrained than capital movement. Time-wise, it is like 2-3 orders of magnitude. I can flip a year's worth of even high-end labor in USD to CNY under all the capital controls in both host nations in 10 days give or take and make the transfer permanent. Whereas permanently moving my labor in compliance between the same nations is on the order of thousands of days, semi-permanently (residency) moving the same labor is on the order of hundreds of days, and moving labor within 90 days involves all sorts of strings attached that capital doesn't bother with. Issues surrounding healthcare, education (if you have or intend to start a family), cultural and social fit, language, taxes, housing, transportation, forex, etc. pop up when you really dig into the expatriation process, and an amazing amount of what you put up with are purely political constructs and not intrinsic to the actual move itself. So the question becomes not "What are my best and quickest options...", but more "here is my situation and anticipated future desires in lots of pretty intimate personal detail, now what are my options?"

I used to subscribe to the Church of Globalization, but once I delved into the actual practice of expatriation and realized just how much capital movement is favored over labor movement, that was the start of the crack in that edifice, and now I want Capital Globalization rolled back to reciprocity with Labor Globalization, and then roll both forward in tandem. When it gets as easy to move around the world and vote with your feet as with your financial tokens, then I'm fully on board with progressing globalization.

jacquesm• 8 years ago

Germany or Canada.

rexpop• 8 years ago

The caravans are real. Buzzfeed writer Adolfo Flores is embedded with them — https://www.buzzfeed.com/adolfoflores

nemild• 8 years ago

For anyone interested, I'm always open to PRs for the "Media Literacy for Engineers" doc I put together:

https://github.com/nemild/hacking-engineers

Examples like this are what I include, about how third-parties can manipulate media sources for their own ends.

cirrus-clouds• 8 years ago

Charlie Brooker did an excellent spoof video of the way news is reported. The video is 8 years old (made in 2010) but it still rings true today:

How to report the news:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI

Every TV news report on the economy in one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN2iVe8_Ato

mattnewton• 8 years ago

What better way to drive home the point that news is bought to influence people, then to buy a bunch of local news channels and use it to tell people that? There is some beautiful symmetry here, even if it was unintentional.

rhapsodic2• 8 years ago

Those news anchors were either OK with the contents of the script they were ordered to read, or they were gutless cowards for not resigning or allowing themselves to be fired.

macintux2• 8 years ago

The journalism job market ain't what it used to be. I find it hard to label people trying to keep their family fed and housed as "gutless cowards."

anigbrowl6• 8 years ago

That's true, but getting paid a lot so that the personal sacrifices would be that much greater isn't greater moral ill for the news anchors. They could go and get regular jobs (ie at median pay when starting a different career, but are over-leveraged, basically. That's a tough spot to be in, but it doesn't make it OK to participate in further debasement of the system.

makomk• 8 years ago

Yeah, I think very few outlets are doing well these days, aside from the New York Times and maybe one or two others. (Which makes it a little ironic for the NYT to stir fear about one company having too much power over what people see, especially since they're no strangers to pushing narratives themselves...)

uptown• 8 years ago

Here's some context around the provisions of the contracts these anchors frequently work under:

https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/980800914423406592

https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/980811757726810112

Essentially, if they were to chose to leave, they'd owe 40% of their base pay prorated by the remainder of their contract, as-well as the potential requirement to return some bonuses received. Vacation days are lost, and there are typically non-competes within the same region.

elsonrodriguez• 8 years ago

You have to almost admire the design of such a contract. The history behind how this spread throughout the local news industry has to be super interesting.

The conspiracy theorist in me feels that the chilling effect this would have on the independence of news anchors was intentional.

rhapsodic2• 8 years ago

Essentially, if they were to chose to leave, they'd owe 40% of their base pay prorated by the remainder of their contract, as-well as the potential requirement to return some bonuses received. Vacation days are lost, and there are typically non-competes within the same region.

That's entirely beside the point. They freely entered into those contracts. Now that push has come to shove, they chose money and personal well-being over their integrity and beliefs. (Or maybe they were OK with the message they were ordered to read, in which case their integrity is intact.)

logfromblammo2• 8 years ago

You are insulting the wrong people. Please do not blame the victims for choosing not to walk willingly into homelessness and financial ruin. Blame those that allow such gross power imbalances to occur.

anigbrowl6• 8 years ago

How are we to know who they are when they have effective control of the media?

homelessness and financial ruin

News anchors in the Bay Area are paid about $4-500k. They may be operating under onerous contracts with clawbacks, but they could budget strategically or fight those contracts in court to expose how bad they are, either personally or via their union. Very few people have that kind of financial room to maneuver or the public following that would bring a sympathetic audience for a legal battle.

verylittlemeat• 8 years ago

You're right that a power imbalance caused this but that doesn't let the news anchors off the hook. These anchors know what their talents are. They are trained to speak with confidence and to appear as an information authority to their communities. This isn't some cog in the machine tweaking a spreadsheet in an office building that leads to some guy losing a job 1,000 miles away. These anchors are allowing their faces and their voices and the direct trust vested in their personalities to be abused for propaganda.

These anchors should be pushing back because when the shoe drops (like it is now) they will be taking the heat for being paid stooges. They will be disgraced in their community and just replaced by someone else willing to read whatever they're told until it happens again.

saturdaysaint• 8 years ago

Or maybe they had families and mortgages and student loans that they couldn't drop on a dime because they got asked to do something basically unheard of on the nightly news? Sinclair affiliates are primarily NOT located in the kind of metropolises where a journalist could expect to get a job the next week, either.

analogmemory• 8 years ago

Last Week Tonight (John Oliver) dove into this last year. It's really frustrating that they can leverage so much political sway under the cover of "news reporting". Then forcing news stations to broadcast this garbage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc

ModernMech13• 8 years ago

He did a follow up last night with this new development.

rlindgren4• 8 years ago

"👎" to the John Oliver reference. His "reporting" is as biased as it gets. His show is written in a style that convinces the subconscious to accept presented arguments without engaging any serious logical scrutiny. Just try to remember if at any point during any of his broadcasts you actually analyzed the subject of his monologues, rather than simply furthering the thought-process that he was laying out for you. Chances are that you never have because it's written to be persuasive (obviously) and only incidentally informative. Sadly, I know this is precisely what many people now believe "journalism" to be...

somebehemoth• 8 years ago

John Oliver hosts a late night talk show and he is primarily a comedian. He is not a journalist so your commentary on journalism seems misplaced on this point.

rfw• 8 years ago

Can you refute the claims in the video posted? The style is unrelated to the validity of the claims.

root_axis• 8 years ago

Can you give me an example of unbiased reporting on television?

philipodonnell• 8 years ago

It seems like the issue is a lack of competition, if I don't like what Sinclair is saying I can not watch it, but if they own all the stations then I don't have that choice. The FCC did all this while everyone was distracted with net neutrality, so even if it came up again there the FCC knows how to distract people already. I'm just not sure what I as a viewer/voter can do about except wait for the next election, and even then, there's no guarantee that the candidate who wins is going to do anything about it.

But... looking at the list of stations Sinclair owns[0]... where are the markets that they control all the stations, defined as ABC+NBC+FOX+CBS? I honestly don't see any. Is this more of a concern if they do manage to get all of these, or if the merger with Tribune Media goes through?

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stations_owned_or_oper...

ChicagoDave2• 8 years ago

I do see this as a bad thing, but I also know that everyone under 40 gets their news from the web. The target audience for these channels are older people who don't read news online or on mobile phones.

In a way, Sinclair is becoming a TV streaming service.

I sense the badness, but I also think they run the risk of spending a lot of money on a wasted effort.

You can only influence people if they're dumb _and_ watching your news programs. Seems like a dwindling market if you ask me. People already have FOX News and they've reached their ceiling (35% of the population). Sinclair is going to run into the same demographic problem.

x2202• 8 years ago

You can only influence people if they're dumb _and_ watching your news programs. Seems like a dwindling market if you ask me.

The amount of people watching TV is going down, but the proportion of people who think uncritically is skyrocketing.

anigbrowl6• 8 years ago

I have gotten my news from web for 25 years but I still watch local news 2 night s a week - to see coverage of some local issue, to check on the weather or see a bit of a baseball game, or just by default.

And while people over 40 are generally in the second half of their lives and heading for the demographic exits, that doesn't mean they're politically irrelevant. They're far more likely to vote, more likely to be homeowners/property tax payers (with the political heft that that gives), and have greater financial and political heft than their younger counterparts. You're naive if you think they're just bumbling along without thinking of much of anything. Just because you find that demographic boring and personally irrelevant doesn't mean they can't exert political power over you int eh aggregate. Many such people are willing to have their opinions shaped or validated by broadcast media and act accordingly.

Take Fox News; it's easy to make fun of their audience, because who int heir right mind would take people like Sean Hannity seriously? And yet millions do, and their existence and hostility cannot be wished away.

Incidentally, just "getting your news from the web" is no guarantee of objectivity either. Come on, we live in a society where people in high places tweet links to Infowars or Qanon conspiracy theories non-ironically.

ChicagoDave2• 8 years ago

I agree with your assessment, but my "gut" feeling is that Sinclair is over-reaching and the expectation won't match the spend. ESPN just announced their streaming service ESPN+. This is just another nail in cable TV's coffin. In a few years, broadcast television may be on its last legs.

We're on the verge of a Spotify for TV where you can pick your own channels, including which "local" channel you want. Some people may still pick the Sinclair run station and be influenced, but my point is that we're reading this Sinclair deal in the context of the past.

And people have an interesting habit of recognizing when they're being manipulated and they call B.S.

First West Virginia, now Oklahoma where school teachers are fed up with tax cuts that only benefit corporations and the wealthy and end up taking away from teachers and students.

We have a tragic and unexpectedly organized and mature set of Florida teenagers that are giving the NRA a run for their money. They may have knocked a Fox News mainstay off the air by forcing most of her advertisers to bolt.

My sense, and it's just intuition based on the news of the day, is that people are just starting to push back. Sinclair probably needed the FCC changes 10 years ago. I think it's probably just too late.

sitkack• 8 years ago

Isn't the rate of voting much higher for 40+? As a method for controlling a large block of voters, this probably pretty effective. How many of these people are also going to see other sources of news? They probably have the TV on for comfort (fear), everything else is a side effect.

Tactic• 8 years ago

Lest you are in too much of a bubble realize there are many people that live in areas with poor or absent internet. I suspect there are, in fact, people under 40 that get their news from local television.

You may also want to reconsider that only dumb people can be influenced by this or other means of manipulation.

And... if you can influence 35% of the population, it is fairly easy to get a voting majority from that point given participation rates. Especially, as others have said, if you are influencing the rather large and active over 40 population.

swerveonem• 8 years ago

How much would it cost to buy all that airtime?

AlphaWeaver• 8 years ago

The actual video they talked about is linked on this [1] page... It's mildly haunting to watch...

[1] https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/how-americas-largest-local...

shadowtree• 8 years ago

The branding of those stations is the core problem, no?

Says ABC/NBC/Fox - but actually that's just a logo.

Why not have them clearly labeled as Sinclair, then consumer would know. And maybe still be fine with it.

This way it's indeed shady.

rglover4• 8 years ago

Nothing new. I worked in a newsroom as an intern and most major news stations rely (maybe, relied, it's been a few years) on a tool like ENPS. It's made by the Associated Press and has a "wire" feature where new stories come into. So, e.g., if there was a plane crash, that message would be pushed out to all newsrooms that rely on ENPS.

The news producers were lazy, too. They'd literally take the script that ENPS pushes out, tweak a few words, and put it on air. I was working in a minor midwestern market (Toledo, Ohio). If you watched the evening broadcasts in the same market and nationally, you'd frequently see the same stories and similar verbiage popping up.

Being surprised by a broadcast group like Sinclair was forcing a narrative is like being surprised that the sky is blue. The "news" is highly filtered and easily controlled. To think otherwise is deliberate ignorance.

The broadcasting industry is corrupt and untrustworthy as all hell. My father worked in it at a high level (owning licenses and stations) and he'd frequently come home from trips either stone faced or frustrated beyond belief: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/business/media/22spectrum... (he's the stately looking black fella throwing a fit in this piece).

To trust anything the mass media tells you is to severely handicap your intelligence. Unfortunately, large swats of the general public do exactly that.

/rant

ptr_void• 8 years ago

Where do you suggest people go to get their news instead ?

stronglikedan• 8 years ago

One must try to find points of view from all "sides", and then apply critical thinking to everything that one reads/hears. Every source is very biased and full of a lot of (mostly, really) shit, but the facts can be discerned if personal biases give way to objective analysis.

beat3• 8 years ago

National/international news from AP and Reuters is about as politically neutral as you can get. Major news networks, even overtly partisan ones like FOX News, rarely outright lie - their bias is in sins of omission. You can watch ABC, CNN, FOX, or read the NY Times or Washington Post, and take it with a grain of salt if it starts feeling one-sided.

The internet is a wonderful thing.

But the heart of the bias problem isn't that the sources are biased, at least if you stay away from outright nonsense like InfoWars. Rather, the problem is that people are biased, and then start looking for news that reinforces our biases. We can even read the same story and get entirely different interpretations of it (see all the arguing downthread about DACA negotiations).

Facts are (mostly) objective; interpretation is always subjective.

rglover4• 8 years ago

It's less about finding different sources and more about learning how to critically evaluate what you hear (i.e., not blindly letting your own biases accept the narrative as it's delivered).

It also depends on what the story involves. The example I gave above—a plane crash—is very objective. Something bad happened, people were likely hurt, authorities are investigating, etc. Where it starts to get murky is when a story taps into an ongoing narrative like gun control.

Notice how the major news networks were (and still are) each pushing their own narrative around the Parkland shooting. The left-leaning media were pushing the need for more gun control and anchoring that to the victims, the right was babbling on about how the left was just trying to steal everyone's guns and why gun ownership is positive. It's where you're being told that one side is "evil" that your antennae should go up.

In situations like these, it's worth considering what is factually true, what is opinion/emotionally-driven bias, and working hard to form your own opinions.

evgen• 8 years ago

There is a significant difference between using a common source like a news wire and being told 'by corporate' what you will say. A news desk can decide what wire stories to print and how to edit them, but can't do the same for directives and scripts from the Sinclair mothership.

Don't try to claim these are in any way equivalent.

rglover4• 8 years ago

Don't try to claim these are in any way equivalent.

Not my goal (see comment on other reply here). Just pointing out that the media as a whole is not to be trusted in any way shape or form. Like I noted on the other comment above, this situation is far worse than what I saw in the newsroom; just not surprising having seen the machine at work.

anigbrowl6• 8 years ago

OK but while you're making a cynical critique you're (perhaps inadvertently) creating a false equivalence between reportage (of events like plane crashes, notwithstanding the possibility of editorial selectivity/framing) and straight up opinion/editorial that doesn't inform the viewer of any facts whatsoever. This is not just as bad, but qualitatively worse.

I'm a fan of your Dad by the way, I remember that article when it was originally published.

rglover4• 8 years ago

Fair enough. That wasn't my intent. Just noting that the facade we see as consumers of this stuff is not the reality behind the scenes (and to ever expect it to be is careless). You're right, this is infinitely worse.

alttab• 8 years ago

Almost like Trump was playing 4D chess and exposes fake news by using fake news to spread fake news.

korethr• 8 years ago

So, this explains the creepy video I saw over the weekend, of numerous news stations reciting the same canned speech, verbatim. When I see one station doing it, or similar sentiment from multiple stations in their own words, that might slightly temper my cynicism about the (lack of) objectivity and truthfulness of the news. But when I see shit like this, it only serves to harden my cynicism.

krapp• 8 years ago

So, this explains the creepy video I saw over the weekend, of numerous news stations reciting the same canned speech, verbatim.

Local news stations receive packages and content with scripts pre-written from national networks and other sources all the time. It's not a conspiracy, and it shouldn't cast doubt on the truthfulness of a story.

Television news is a scripted medium, and most stations don't have the time or talent to write a completely unique script for every newscast from scratch.

sjwright• 8 years ago

When it's the introduction to a news package, fair enough.

When it's a politically charged attack on competitors, it crosses a pretty uncomfortable line.

jessaustin2• 8 years ago

After making it about halfway through the comments here, I flagged TFA. It is probably "hypocritical" for me to say this, since I also have political opinions. Here it is anyway: despite the widespread understanding that "mainstream" news media leans Democrat, the fact that USA president is controversial and drives increased viewership has added tens of millions of dollars to their bottom lines. This would make a thoughtful person wonder just how committed to the Democrats (or "the truth"?) they really are. Similar observations about other media firms are left as an exercise for the reader.

beat3• 8 years ago

It's kind of sad to see a potentially important discussion here devolve into a: off-topic threads about policy (DACA), or partisan trolling about #fakenews to derail the subject away from Sinclair.

That said, something I'm curious about... how many people still get their news primarily from local tv broadcast in this day and age? And what are the age ranges of those people? Lacking any actual data, I'd suggest by complete conjecture that it's not that many, and they skew much older than the general population. I'd be surprised if anyone under the age of 30 watches local tv news regularly at all.

I know that personally, I watch so little local news that when I do, the cognitive dissonance is kind of jarring. And when do I watch it? Mostly, when visiting my Baby Boomer in-laws...

HankB99• 8 years ago

I watch morning news in the Chicago market for weather and traffic. I suppose I also get local news. And I get irked because I don't think cute Youtube videos are news but regardless of the station I can't seem to escape that. I'm getting tired of the transplant doctor that dresses up as a Star Wars character (the big furry thing) to deliver good news. Maybe I'm getting too old or just not enough of a Star Wars fan. (Wookie. That's the thing that the doctor impersonates.)

I looked for Sinclair station ownership in this market and according to The Book of Knowledge (Wikipedia) there is none.

daodedickinson• 8 years ago

You've never seen these kind of videos before? Local news stations have been gutted for at least a decade and they get just about all their non-local content in this way.

cmurf• 8 years ago

So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased. Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/98079918342580224...

I think it's reasonable to conclude that POTUS likes that Sinclair compels local news anchors to recite scripts that present a favorable impression of, support for, his policies or him personally.

This is the American crony capitalism version of what Putin did with his state media in order to gain and retain control of the country, and destroy his adversaries. Trump won't have to have his adversaries poisoned. He's poisoning the ability for people to triangulate. And near as I can tell this is what people who support him want. They do not want contrary opinions. They want an autocrat.

CodeWriter23• 8 years ago

The interesting thing here is the groupthink believes this methodology is unique to Sinclair.

squozzer• 8 years ago

A certain conservative radio talk show host has a hobby of stringing together identical-sounding phrases from various sources in the establishment media, as if they all read from the same memo. It seemed certain someone had coordinated their talking points.

Is the Sinclair issue that much different?

Presumably the former example was performed by a group of like-minded individuals operating under some flavor of free will, who arrived at a consensus. But we can't be sure that was the process. They might have been coerced, or merely chose to parrot each other regardless of circumstance, because they found themselves so well aligned.

Sinclair, on the other hand, assumed obedience by virtue of signing the checks.

That said, I don't know if this situation is as scary as it used to be, now that we've had some experience with the power of more monolithic-appearing news sources such as FB and Google.

RickJWag• 8 years ago

Reminds me of when Trump won the Republican nomination-- a gob of stories ran with basically the same theme and spin.

There's no such thing as straight news. It's all spin, one way or the other.

Here's Politico's take on the Trump speech lockstep reaction: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/trump-convention-spee...

Fjolsvith• 8 years ago

This is a non issue for my household either way. We cut the cord a year ago and haven't missed the spin doctors and commercial breaks.

Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script

Related Stories