Sinclair Infiltrates Local News With Lara Trump’s RNC Playbook; The New Republic, June 17, 2024

Ben Metzner, The New Republic; Sinclair Infiltrates Local News With Lara Trump’s RNC Playbook

"Sinclair Broadcast Group, the right-wing media behemoth swallowing up local news stations and spitting them out as zombie GOP propaganda mills, is ramping up pro-Trump content in the lead-up to the 2024 election. Its latest plot? A coordinated effort across at least 86 local news websites to suggest that Joe Biden is mentally unfit for the presidency, based on edited footage and misinformation.

According to Judd Legum, Sinclair, which owns hundreds of television news stations around the country, has been laundering GOP talking points about Biden’s age and mental capacity into news segments of local Fox, ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates. One replica online article with the headline “Biden appears to freeze, slur words during White House Juneteenth event” shares no evidence other than a spliced-together clip of Biden watching a musical performance and another edited video of Biden giving a speech originally posted on X by Sean Hannity. The article was syndicated en masse on the same day at the same time, Legum found, suggesting that editors at the local affiliates were not given the chance to vet the segment for accuracy.

Most outrageously, the article, along with at least two others posted in June, makes the evidence-free claim that Biden may have pooped himself at a D-Day memorial event in France, based on a video of the president sitting down during the event. According to Legum, one of the article’s URLs includes the word “pooping.”

Watch: Local Sinclair Anchors Read Same Shady Script on Biden’s Age; The New Republic, June 11, 2024

 Hafiz Rashid, The New Republic; Watch: Local Sinclair Anchors Read Same Shady Script on Biden’s Age

"Local television news broadcasters are airing suspiciously similar attackson Joe Biden’s mental acuity and how it will affect the coming election—and it appears to be part of a coordinated effort. 

The Sinclair Broadcast Group owns or operates 185 local television stations across the country, and dozens of their stations aired a segment from national correspondent Matthew Galka citing a Wall Street Journalarticle that makes dubious attacks on Biden’s age and mental awareness. The stations that aired the segment introduced it using startlingly similar, if not identical language, the Popular Information and Public Notice newsletters reported.

It’s not the first time Sinclair, owned by right-wing businessman David D. Smith, has appeared to be running a conservative propaganda campaign. Infamously in 2018, dozens of the company’s TV stations were caught airing an identical editorial about the dangers of biased and false news. This time around, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, as well as Murdoch’s cable news stations Fox News and Fox Business, have gotten in on the act...

Earlier this year, Smith purchased The Baltimore Sun, insulting its staff and laying out a vision to steer it in the conservative direction of his TV stations. It’s quite obvious that Smith, Murdoch, and other conservative millionaires and billionaires are taking over as many media outlets as possible to push right-wing political propaganda, with the Biden age article and subsequent TV segments as examples of the end product they want. They’re finding vast opportunities in America’s declining news deserts, as well as the skeletal newspapers gutted by hedge funds and profit-seeking corporations. It doesn’t just bode well for the next election, but also portends a scary future for American democracy for decades to come."

Dan Rather Has Scathing Words For Sinclair News Anchors Reading ‘Propaganda’; HuffPost, April 2, 2018

Andy McDonald, HuffPost; Dan Rather Has Scathing Words For Sinclair News Anchors Reading ‘Propaganda’

"Renowned former CBS news anchor Dan Rather chimed in on the disturbing story that Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner of more than 170 U.S. TV stations, had forced its local news outlets to read the same script decrying “false news.”...

Dan Rather

✔@DanRather

News anchors looking into camera and reading a script handed down by a corporate overlord, words meant to obscure the truth not elucidate it, isn't journalism. It's propaganda. It's Orwellian. A slippery slope to how despots wrest power, silence dissent, and oppress the masses.

3:54 PM - Apr 2, 2018

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John Oliver: Sinclair Broadcasters ‘Like Members Of A Brainwashed Cult’; HuffPost, April 2, 2018

Rebecca Shapiro, HuffPost; John Oliver: Sinclair Broadcasters ‘Like Members Of A Brainwashed Cult’

"[John Oliver] was back Sunday night with this message: 

“Nothing says ‘we value independent media’ like dozens of reporters forced to repeat the same message over and over again like members of a brainwashed cult.” 

Sinclair's Propaganda Bomb Is What Media Critics Have Warned About Since Reagan; Esquire, April 2, 2018

Charles P. Pierce, Esquire; Sinclair's Propaganda Bomb Is What Media Critics Have Warned About Since Reagan

[Kip Currier: 
During my undergraduate degree at the University of Pittsburgh, I spent my junior year in Kobe, Japan, attending a Japanese university and living with a Japanese chemistry professor emeritus and his wife. Toward the end of my year there, my Japanese skills had gotten proficient enough to have some really "meaty", impactful discussions. I've never forgotten a conversation I had with my host mother, Haruko, who shared her experiences as a 20-something housewife raising her young sons in the waning days of World War II, while her husband taught at one of the Japanese Naval Colleges on the Japan Sea.

U.S. forces were poised to land in Japan and the Japanese state media were disseminating stories about all manner of alleged atrocities the media said would occur if the Americans were to step on Japanese soil. My host mother Haruko said that because the Japanese Imperial Army controlled the media, the populace, people like her, had no access to information other than what the state media put out via radio and newspapers. As an island archipelago with no land borders with other nations, this was especially true for Japan. Years later, she said she came to understand how they had been misled by the Imperial Army's disinformation and propaganda. I never forgot how important information--access to the truth--is.

Access to information--truthful, trusted, verifiable information--is the linchpin of a free and independent press, informed citizenry, and healthy, functioning, questioning democracies. James Madison's 1822 admonition about information, cited in the excerpt below, is as timely as ever.]

"Not only is this a cautionary tale about media consolidation—Sinclair is inches away from owning stations in Chicago and Los Angeles—it’s also a cautionary tale about the imbalance between labor and management in a very visible industry. When the mash-up appeared this weekend, anonymous Sinclair employees leapt to the electric Twitter machine to talk about the read-or-die pressure on the employees in the company’s local stations. And, when this happens in the context of an administration dedicated to keeping people stupid enough to believe all its lies, you have reached a critical mass driving the country inexorably toward the result of Mr. Madison’s great warning:

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.”"

Confessions Of A Former Sinclair News Director; Huffington Post, April 2, 2018

Aaron Weiss, Huffington Post; Confessions Of A Former Sinclair News Director

"Only Sinclair forces those trusted local journalists to lend their credibility to shoddy reporting and commentary that, if it ran in other countries, we would rightly dismiss as state propaganda...

When Deadspin’s genius supercut of Sinclair’s latest promo went viral last weekend, my heart broke for the anchors who were used to make the equivalent of a proof-of-life hostage video. They know what they’re being conscripted to do, but most of them have no choice in the matter. They’re trapped by contracts, by family obligations and by an industry that is struggling to stay relevant in an era of changing media habits.

The anchors who were forced to decry “fake news” put their own credibility on the line, accusing “some members of the media” of pushing “their own personal bias and agenda,” when nothing could be further from the truth...

There’s nothing inherently wrong with journalism that wears its bias on its sleeve. At some point, local news may transform into something more like the cable news landscape, with hosts who are paid to share their perspective and commentary. But that requires honesty on the part of station owners, and it requires embracing a diversity of viewpoints on the air. That’s the exact opposite of what Sinclair is doing to local broadcasting today."

As Sinclair’s sound-alike anchors draw criticism for ‘fake news’ promos, Trump praises broadcaster; Washington Post, April 2, 2018

Paul Farhi, Washington Post; As Sinclair’s sound-alike anchors draw criticism for ‘fake news’ promos, Trump praises broadcaster

"Tim Burke had a simple idea: Take clips of dozens of TV news anchors all spouting the same lines and mash them up into one video. The idea, he said, was to expose how one company, Sinclair Broadcast Group, had turned its many local newscasts into a national megaphone for its corporate views.

So Burke, the video director at Deadspin, pieced together video of anchors at 45 Sinclair-owned stations across the United States, all reading from a script that the ­Maryland-based company recently distributed to its stations about the perils of “fake news” and how it is “extremely dangerous to our democracy.”

The result was a massively viral video that sparked broad mainstream media attention, incited an angry tweet from President Trump, and prompted a national conversation about the perils of enabling companies such as Sinclair to control an ever-larger number of TV stations."

News Anchors Reciting Sinclair Propaganda Is Even More Terrifying in Unison; New York Magazine, April 1, 2018

New York Magazine; News Anchors Reciting Sinclair Propaganda Is Even More Terrifying in Unison

"The anchors were forced to read the so-called journalistic responsibility messages word for word by their employer, the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest owner of television stations in the country. The features were one of Sinclair’s now infamous “must-run” segments, consisting of conservative commentary that every Sinclair-owned station is required to air.

Think Progress rounded up many of the “fake stories” segments for a chilling video on Friday, but Deadspin’s Timothy Burke published a much more terrifying version on Saturday, which at one point shows 30 of the segments synced up in unison..."