Showing posts with label local news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label local news. Show all posts

Monday, June 17, 2024

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.”

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

The rebirth of local news depends on all of us; The Washington Post, October 6, 2023

Leonard Downie Jr., The Washington Post ; The rebirth of local news depends on all of us

"Whenever they are asked, Americans say they want and depend on news coverage of their local communities. Its rebirth depends on them."