APRIL 4, 2018


NEWS AND VIEWS


https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/04/04/facebook-now-thinks-87-million-had-data-shared-cambridge-analytica/486633002/?csp=chromepush
Facebook now thinks 87 million had data shared with Cambridge Analytica
USA TODAY Published 2:55 p.m. ET April 4, 2018
Laura Mandaro and Mike Snider, USA TODAY Published 2:55 p.m. ET April 4, 2018 | Updated 5:31 p.m. ET April 4, 2018

Photographs -- Facebook now thinks 87 million had data shared with Cambridge Analytica

Here's how a data firm helped Donald Trump get elected as president. We have the FAQs. USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook said it now thinks up to 87 million people, mostly in the United States, may have had their data improperly shared by political targeting firm Cambridge Analytica.

The new estimate, disclosed in a blog post where it detailed other plans to tighten privacy of its users' personal information, is higher than the estimate of 50 million people reported three weeks ago by The New York Times and The Observer.

The social network's latest disclosures are likely to heighten concerns about how it gave too-free access to its users' personal information and that efforts to roll back this access come too late. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on the defensive and is now scheduled to testify next week before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

In an hour-long call with reporters, Zuckerberg addressed these concerns while acknowledging how vulnerable users had been to malicious activity.

"It's clear now we didn't focus enough on preventing abuse and thinking through how people could use these tools for harm," he said. "We didn't take a broad enough view of what our responsibility is, and that was a huge mistake. It was my mistake."

Zuckerberg's April 11 appearance before the committee will be his first congressional appearance, but not likely his last. Discussions continue into Zuckerberg's appearance before two other congressional committees: the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees.

Facebook last month disclosed it knew Cambridge Analytica had obtained personal information from hundreds of thousands of users who had downloaded a personality profile app that then passed it on to the firm, which says it had assisted Donald Trump in his successful presidential campaign. Cambridge Analytica denies using any ill-gotten Facebook data in those efforts and repeated that defense Wednesday.

The situation has resulted in an investigation into Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general from 37 states and territories calling for information from the company on its data security procedures.

Even before news arose of this massive data-mining operation of Facebook users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had pledged to spend 2018 attempting to counter various concerns facing the social network. Among them: fabricated news that misled millions, live broadcasts of homicides and terrorism, racist targeting of ads, troubling search results and Russian manipulation.

The increased estimate follows a disconcerting pattern for Facebook when it's come to disclosing practices that have violated its users' privacy.

Zuckerberg, after initially calling suggestions that "fake news" on Facebook influenced the election in any way "pretty crazy," later backtracked and apologized. Under pressure from lawmakers' last fall, Facebook executives testified and released increasingly higher estimates on the extent and breadth of Russian manipulation on the platform. Just this Tuesday, Facebook again disclosed it had found more Russian-organized fake accounts and posts on its platform and its Instagram service.

On Wednesday, Zuckerberg again apologized for initially dismissing the worries about faked news.

More: Facebook deletes more Russian troll farm-affiliated accounts*

USA TODAY reporter Mike Snider reported from McLean, Va.



ZUCKERBERG STEPPING DOWN? DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH!

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-speaks-out-ahead-of-testifying-before-congress/
CBS NEWS April 4, 2018, 4:12 PM
Mark Zuckerberg says he's not stepping down at Facebook, nobody fired after data scandal

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters on a Wednesday conference call that as many as 87 million accounts may have been accessed by Cambridge Analytica, significantly above a previous estimate of 50 million. In a lengthy Q&A session, Zuckerberg said that there was still a degree of uncertainty over just how much data had been obtained by the firm and Cambridge researcher Aleksandr Kogan, who devised the app they used to mine user profiles.

"We don't know how many people's data Kogan got and what he sold to Cambridge Analytica," Zuckerberg said. He said that the initial estimate of 50 million accounts was from a third party, and that he was "confident that it's not more than 87 million — it could be less." A 37 million-person margin of error is an enormous cushion, much bigger on its own than most data breaches.

"We didn't take a broad enough view what our responsibility was," Zuckerberg said on the conference call, explaining how it has handled users' data in the past.

The Cambridge Analytica data scandal has forced the social media company to answer tough questions on its seeming failure to protect user data. Zuckerberg will be testifying before Congress for the first time next week.

Zuckerberg was asked if internal governance had been questioned in the wake of the data scandal, or whether Facebook's board had considered removing him. "Uh, not that I'm aware of," he responded.

Zuckerberg also confirmed that nobody at Facebook had lost their job as a result of the breach, insisting instead that all responsibility rests with him.

"At the end of the day, this is my responsibility," Zuckerberg said, noting, "I'm not looking to throw anyone else under the bus."

Asked if he is still the best person to run the social media giant he created, Zuckerberg simply answered, "Yes."

The 87 million figure represents nearly half of all registered voters in the U.S.. Facebook is under scrutiny for failing to tell customers in 2015 when it found users' information had been accessed without their permission by Cambridge Analytica. Facebook, in an update posted Wednesday afternoon, said it will be better informing users about how their information is used, but didn't announce any major changes in policy.

What you need to know about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica

A Facebook spokeswoman explained the number increased once Facebook conducted its own internal review.

"The 50 million number originally reported was an estimate provided by parties other than Facebook," the spokeswoman told CBS News. "We undertook our own internal review to determine the number of people potentially impacted."

On the conference call, Zuckerberg pointed out that people freely share their information on Facebook, and stated that Facebook doesn't sell users' information, rather they "use data to make the services better" and keep the platform free. Facebook took in $40.65 billion in revenue in 2017, largely through ads, micro-targeted to its more than 2 billion users using their personal data.

Zuckerberg, asked why Cambridge Analytica was only recently banned, said they hadn't really been accessing Facebook's services several years back, until the 2016 election, and that he wasn't aware of the company's reputation.

"They were not really a player that we had been paying attention to," he said.

Zuckerberg claimed Facebook has 15,000 employees currently in charge of information security, and will have 20,000 by the end of the year. Lawmakers are expected to pose tough questions to Zuckerberg on Wednesday, when he testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Zuckerberg also addressed concerns about disinformation. Special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 13 Russians for attempting to influence the 2016 presidential campaign, largely through the use of social media platforms including Facebook. Zuckerberg took some responsibility for, in a 2016 interview with the BBC, saying fake news couldn't sway the election. Zuckerberg said he made a mistake by dismissing the matter so flippantly.

Zuckerberg said it will be a "multi-year" process to combat disinformation, although he doesn't think achieving perfection in that arena is necessarily possible. Zuckerberg said this will be a "never-ending battle."

"I'm confident we're making progress against these adversaries but they're very sophisticated," Zuckerberg said. "...We can't expect to fully solve a problem like this."

© 2018 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.



BERNIE SANDERS FOLLOWERS HAVE BOOSTED A SOMEWHAT UNKNOWN YOUNG DEMOCRAT’S CAMPAIGN FUNDING LEVELS TO $6.7 MILLION (JUST IN THE FIRST QUARTER OF 2018). NOW THAT’S “COATTAILS!” IT’S ALSO A SIGN THAT THE COUNTRY IS READY FOR A DEMOCRAT, I THINK. THERE HAVE BEEN SEVERAL UPSETS OF THIS SAME KIND IN THE BALLOTING ALREADY THIS YEAR. WHEN SANDERS PLACED HIS FACE BEFORE THE CAMERA ON THE DAY AFTER THE 2016 ELECTION AND ASKED EVERY LIBERAL OR PROGRESSIVE PERSON WHO POSSIBLY CAN TO RUN FOR OFFICE ON ANY LEVEL OF ANY GOVERNMENT, HE SHOWED WHAT A STRATEGIST HE IS. HE KNOWS THAT THE PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO BE SPOONFED PABLUM ANY MORE.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS REACHED A SAD AND SICK LOW, SO THAT THEY CAN’T GENERATE EXCITEMENT OR BOOST THE NEW PEOPLE COMING UP IN THE RANKS. THAT REALLY NEEDS TO CHANGE; BUT IF IT MEANS THAT I CAN’T PUT SANDERS ABOVE THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY STRUCTURE, THEN I WON’T GIVE THEM MONEY OR VOTE FOR THEIR CANDIDATES IN THE FUTURE.

THAT’S THE KIND OF ORGANIZING THAT THE REPUBLICANS HAVE BEEN DOING CONSTANTLY IN THE LAST TEN OR FIFTEEN YEARS, AND AS A RESULT IT IS TOO OFTEN EASY FOR THEM TO BEAT US. ASIDE FROM THE FACT THAT BERNIE’S JUST A VERY CLEVER MAN, I THINK HE KNOWS THAT THE HUNGER FOR SOMETHING BETTER FOR THE 99% IS VERY STRONG. THE THING SANDERS IS TRYING TO DO IS TO PUT A DEMOCRAT ON EVERY LEVEL, SO THAT WE CAN BE A LADDER ATTRACTING MORE LIBERALMINDED VOTERS TO CLIMB UP AND HELPING THEM ALONG THE WAY.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/beto-orourke-hits-paydirt-bernie-sanders-money-machine/
Beto O’Rourke Hits Pay Dirt With Bernie Sanders Money Machine
The Democratic Senate nominee raked in $6.7 million and paid more than $2.6 million to former Sanders fundraisers.
R.G. RATCLIFFE
APR 4, 2018

Drawing -- O’Rourke’s campaign has announced that he raised $6.7 million in the first quarter of this year.
Illustration by Anna Donlan; O'Rourke by Pete Marovich/Getty Images

This article was updated to correct information regarding when Florida congressional candidate Tim Canova was a client of Revolution Messaging.

Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Beto O’Rourke had a surprise this week that upstaged Republican incumbent Ted Cruz’s formal reelection kickoff—O’Rourke’s campaign has announced that he raised $6.7 million in the first quarter of this year. That’s more money than any Democratic U.S. Senate candidate has had in Texas since Ron Kirk’s 2002 campaign.

But it also drew attention to something else about O’Rourke’s fundraising, most of which has been done over the internet. Through his February 14 campaign finance report, O’Rourke declared that he has spent $2.6 million for online fundraising services to Revolution Messaging, a progressive operation run by former members of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign for president. O’Rourke told me that he paid no attention to the company’s past clients when he hired them, only what the company and its people could do for his campaign.

O’Rourke’s hiring of Revolution Messaging could be viewed as controversial, even a little gutsy, given the bitter feelings that remain between Democratic factions in Texas who supported Sanders versus those who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“They just have been a really effective technical team for us in making sure that we get digital media, that we get our email newsletter, which we write in-house. I mean, any email signed by me I write personally, any email signed by my team is my permanent staff, and they (Revolution Messaging) make sure that the mail goes out and they get out,” O’Rourke said Tuesday. “We’ve been running now for more than a year. We’re just really focused on Texas. So Bernie or Hillary or really anyone else outside of Texas, you know, I’m happy for them to do whatever they’re doing. I’m going to focus on Texas and Texans. So I really think that what’s going on in Texas right now really even just transcends party.”

O’Rourke said he is appealing to Democrats but also has had Republicans come up to him at rallies to express support. “So I did not focus on the internal Democratic divisions at the time in a year where we really all have got to come together.”

Revolution Messaging brag that they raised $218 million online for Sanders in his race for the Democratic presidential nomination. (They leave out that Sanders was challenging Hillary Clinton.) In Florida, the company had raised $8 million for Tim Canova in the 2016 election cycle. Canova is challenging former Democratic national chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz in her reelection bid to Congress. Canova quit the Democratic Party on Monday to avoid a primary fight with Wasserman Schultz: “I am not screwing the Democratic Party. It has screwed over too many ordinary Americans and it has screwed over too many progressive candidates.” An official with Revolution Messaging said they have represented Canova in the past, but not in the current election cycle.

Already in this year’s Texas elections there has been a controversy over one Democratic candidate’s ties to Revolution Messaging.

One of the principals of Revolution Messaging is Arun Chaudhary, a videographer for Obama and Sanders who is the husband of Houston congressional candidate Laura Moser. You may recall that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee put out a negative package of opposition research on Moser before last month’s primary in hopes of driving her out of the Congressional District 7 Democratic runoff. The attack backfired, and now Moser is in a runoff with Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, who presumably is the preferred candidate of the national Democratic Party.

O’Rourke said it was a mistake for the DCCC to involve itself in the Houston congressional race. “You don’t need any outside interference in this,” O’Rourke said.

Sanders came to Texas just before the Democratic primary last month to give a boost to his followers who were running in Texas congressional districts and state legislative races. Only Moser and Rick Trevino in San Antonio’s 23rd Congressional District are known to have made it to runoffs. O’Rourke is not affiliated with Sanders’s Our Revolution movement.

During the 2016 presidential election, O’Rourke endorsed Clinton, but only after she captured enough delegates to guarantee she would be the Democratic nominee. However, while endorsing Clinton, he also praised Sanders. “We are fortunate to have had such a vigorously contested nomination. Secretary Clinton will be a better general election candidate and president because of the principled, passionate campaign run by Bernie Sanders,” he told the El Paso Times. “I am deeply grateful that he made campaign finance, military intervention and growing income inequality central to the Democratic nomination debate.”

After Democratic National Committee emails leaked in 2016 indicating that Wasserman Schultz had put a thumb on the party scale to help Clinton over Sanders, O’Rourke told the El Paso Times that Sanders supporters “have every right to be upset and disappointed.” He said the emails showed a disturbing lack of neutrality in the party. “It kind of shows how major party politics works on both sides,” O’Rourke said, adding that he hopes the disclosure leads to reform so that the American political system “doesn’t die of legalized corruption.” O’Rourke has said that Sanders’s campaign can be a model for his own.

Voters in both parties can be an unforgiving lot this year. Will Texas Democratic voters dismiss this as a progressive candidate using a progressive fundraising firm in a challenge to the man many Democrats see as the second most evil politician in America, or will Democratic activists see O’Rourke’s fundraising payments as going to non-Democrats who tried to invade the party in 2016 and are at least partially to blame for Clinton’s loss? It also adds fodder to Cruz’s descriptions of O’Rourke as just another Sanders-style Democrat.


SINCLAIR BROADCASTING STORIES


ABOUT SINCLAIR, WHY SHOULD WE CARE? BECAUSE OF THE NATURE OF MANY OF THE WORKING-CLASS AMERICANS. THEY ARE PRETTY MUCH BEATEN DOWN WITH THE PROBLEMS OF MAKING ENOUGH MONEY TO GET BY, CAN’T PAY FOR THE INTERNET AND DON’T HAVE THE ENERGY TO RESEARCH THE NEWS, ANYWAY. THEY JUST WANT IT CUT UP INTO REASONABLE BITE-SIZED CHUNKS. EASY ON THE HOT SAUCE!

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/02/politics/sinclair-trust-in-local-news/index.html
Why Sinclair matters: Local news is Americans' No. 1 news source
Analysis by Harry Enten, CNN
Updated 2:41 PM ET, Mon April 2, 2018

(CNN)A new promo campaign from the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group is raising concerns about the message the company is promoting through the 173 local stations it owns or operates.

A video montage of news anchors at Sinclair stations across the country regurgitating the same company-mandated script decrying "false news" went viral over the weekend. Sinclair says the promos are focused on unsubstantiated stories like "Pope Endorses Trump" or "Pizzagate," but media critics noted that the promos also echoed some of the same anti-media sentiment pushed by President Donald Trump.

Most of Sinclair's stations are CNN affiliates -- meaning CNN shares content and resources with them and vice versa.

Sinclair is the largest owner of local TV stations in the US, but it's not just its size that makes it influential, it's also how the US audience views local news compared to other media.

More people still get their news from local television stations than from any other source.

According to a 2017 Pew Research Center study, 37% of Americans say they often get their news from local television news. That's higher than cable news (28%) or network television news (26%). It's far greater than the percentage of Americans who they get their news through newspapers (18%), radio (25%), social media (20%) and even from news websites (33%).

Local television news also reaches an ideologically diverse audience.

Although a study of local television ratings and transcripts by Gregory J. Martin and Josh McCrain of Emory University determined that viewership of Sinclair owned stations does seem to be lower in Democratic leaning areas, it's not as easy to distinguish liberal versus conservative sources for local news like it is on cable or radio talk shows. Democrats and Republicans are about equally as likely to watch local news, according to Pew. Republicans are 9 points more likely to watch cable news often, as a point of comparison.

It is therefore far easier for any local television news station to get a point of view across to both sides of the aisle in a way that it isn't for other types of news organizations. And yes, Martin and McCrain's study does show that Sinclair focuses far more on national political news than its competitors.

The public is also more likely to trust the information coming from a local news source. Pew found that 85% of Americans trust local news organization at least somewhat for information. That's higher than any other source and even greater than friends and family who clock in at 77% for trust.

This trust is probably why local television news has kept its grip on many demographic groups which you might not expect. While those 65 years and older are the most likely to often get their news from local television (57%), a significant share of 18-29 year-olds (18%) and 30-49 year-olds (28%) still do as well. The ability of local television news to reach a younger audience is one of its main differentiating factors with cable and network news. Less than 17% of those 30-49 and less than 11% of those under 30 get their news often from either cable or network television. (It should be noted that those under 50 are, not surprisingly, more likely to get their news online than on television.)

The group that is most likely to get their news from local news are the group that Trump has become closely associated with: the working class. Pew found that nearly one-half of those making less than $30,000 a year and nearly one-half of those with a high school degree or less often get their news from local television. The percentage of the working class who get their news from local television is over 10 points higher than those who get it from cable or network television. Among those who make more than $75,000 a year or have at least a college degree, less than 30% often get their information from local television news. Slightly more from these groups rely on cable news.



MOTHER JONES LAYS IT ON THE LINE, AS USUAL.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/ready-for-trump-tv-inside-sinclair-broadcastings-plot-to-take-over-your-local-news-1/
Ready for Trump TV? Inside Sinclair Broadcasting’s Plot to Take Over Your Local News
Its mix of terrorism alerts, right-wing commentary, and “classic propaganda” could soon reach three-quarters of US households.
ANDY KROLL NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017 ISSUE

One evening in July, David Smith, the executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, strolled into the newsroom at WJLA, the ABC affiliate for Washington, DC, and the crown jewel of his company’s 193-station empire. Smith lacks the name recognition of Rupert Murdoch or the late Roger Ailes. But his company—with holdings concentrated in midsize markets like Tulsa, Flint, and Boise—owns more television stations than any other broadcaster in the country, reaching 2 out of every 5 American homes.

Station staffers thought it odd to see Smith, one of four brothers who control Sinclair, aimlessly show up at this evening hour. According to a source familiar with the newsroom, he assured them that he wouldn’t be staying long; he was just killing time until a dinner appointment. Before he left, he confided that he was headed to the White House, to dine with President Donald Trump himself.

At 67, Smith has thick jowls and a head full of silver hair with wide-set eyes shaped like crescents. A longtime Republican donor who travels in rarefied circles (he once hosted a party for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas), Smith lives outside Baltimore in Maryland’s horse country, where his company is headquartered. Over the past 30 years, Smith and his brothers have transformed a small family company with three TV stations into a media goliath with entrée to the Oval Office. Along the way he has shown no qualms about using his stations for political purposes and has salivated at the prospect of acquiring more under Trump’s friendly regulatory regime. In April, Sinclair hired Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump White House staffer and frequent television surrogate, as its chief political analyst. Epshteyn’s softball interviews with administration officials and brusque commentaries are slavishly pro-Trump; a Baltimore Sun columnist wrote that the segments are “as close to classic propaganda as anything I have seen in broadcast television in the last 30 years.”


After a campaign season spent boosting Trump, Sinclair looks set to grow even bigger thanks to the president’s appointees at the Federal Communications Commission: In May, the company announced a $3.9 billion deal to acquire Tribune Media’s 42 TV stations, which would give Sinclair access to New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, the nation’s three largest media markets. The deal—and, for many, Sinclair itself—came to prominence after John Oliver blasted it in an episode of his HBO show, Last Week Tonight, that has been seen more than 6 million times on YouTube. Experts believe the FCC will approve the merger, despite critics on the left and right who argue the deal will give Sinclair far more reach into American households than the law allows.

“The most important force shaping public opinion continues to be local, over-the-air television,” says Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a senior attorney at Georgetown’s Communications and Technology Law Clinic. “That’s the underlying premise of the FCC continuing to regulate broadcast ownership.”

But under the leadership of Ajit Pai, a Republican who joined the commission in 2012 and whom Trump elevated to chairman, the FCC has seemingly gone out of its way to grease the wheels for the Sinclair-Tribune merger, reinstating a rule from the Reagan era that could help the company avoid limits on media consolidation. “The FCC is gaming the rules to directly benefit Sinclair,” says Craig Aaron, the president of the public interest group Free Press.

If the merger is approved, Sinclair’s broadcasts will reach 72 percent of all households. Some media analysts have speculated that with Fox News reeling from cascading sexual harassment scandals, Sinclair senses an opportunity to build a rival conservative network. David Smith is reportedly eyeing a collaboration with Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House chief strategist who leads Breitbart News. There have also been reports, which Sinclair denies, that the company is pursuing the ousted Fox host Bill O’Reilly as well as Sean Hannity.

Sinclair’s Plan to Take Over Your Television

Sinclair has downplayed talk about taking on Fox, and Smith, who declined to comment for this story, rarely speaks about the broadcaster’s larger plans. The two companies are clearly in different lines of business. Fox News operates a single channel that shovels red meat, 24 hours a day, to dedicated conservative viewers. Sinclair’s stations around the country slip hardline political content between local weather, high school sports, and city council reports—broadcasting to a mass audience that, survey after survey shows, trusts local news more than any other medium.

“Sinclair is exploiting that credibility or trust that people have invested in their local stations by injecting a political message into it,” warns David Zurawik, the Baltimore Sun‘s veteran TV critic and a close company watcher. “Boris Epshteyn is wrapped in the packaging of the trusted local newsperson.”

In Baltimore, they call it TV Hill. On the north side of the city, it’s home to three of the city’s four biggest stations. There’s WJZ, the mighty CBS affiliate, at the top. Next is WBAL, the Hearst-owned NBC affiliate, its massive transmitter looking out over the city. And at the bottom of the Hill, before you cross the West 41st Street bridge, is WBFF, known to locals as Fox 45, the first station in the Sinclair empire.

“Boris Epshteyn is wrapped in the packaging of the trusted local newsperson.”
Julian Sinclair Smith, an electrical engineer, took a gamble when he founded WBFF. As Smith’s wife, Carolyn, later recalled, the family used “every penny we had” to launch in April 1971. Its call letters stood for “We’re Baltimore’s Finest Features,” but as one of only two independent stations in the city, marooned high on the dial in ultra high frequency (UHF), it struggled to attract quality programming. When early viewers tuned their sets to Channel 45, they usually found reruns of Lassie, black-and-white movies, and kids’ fare like Captain Chesapeake.

By 1986, the family business had grown to three stations, one in Baltimore, one in Pittsburgh, and one in Columbus, Ohio. Under threat from an outside buyer, Smith’s four sons—David, J. Duncan, Robert, and Frederick—took over and renamed it Sinclair Broadcast Group, after their ailing father. (He died from Parkinson’s disease in 1993.) None of the Smith sons had any formal experience running a broadcast media company, though David, the second oldest, had helped found a TV transmitter company. Years earlier, he’d also been a partner in a side project called Ciné Processors that churned out bootlegs of porn movies like Deep Throat from the basement of a building owned by his father’s business. “All you had to do was get the film and sound in sync, and you had something that was not available anywhere,” David Williams, Smith’s partner in the business, told author Eric Klinenberg in Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media. “We’d just solicit guys in the strip joint area and tried to sell them.”

From the day he took over Sinclair, David Smith, the new CEO, whose desk featured a rattlesnake head and a toy shark, had grand ambitions for his small company. Seated together in a bullpen-style office on the WBFF building’s first floor—the better to keep an eye on each other—the Smith brothers used every tool at their disposal to expand their company’s reach.

Standing in their way was the duopoly rule, a 1940s-era policy preventing broadcasters from owning more than one station in a single market. To take over a second station in Baltimore, their mother, Carolyn Smith, and a Pittsburgh-based African American broadcaster named Edwin Edwards Sr. established a company called Glencairn. With financial backing from the Smith family, Glencairn acquired WNUV, but Sinclair would share advertising sales and staffing and provide 20 hours of programming a day. While Edwards controlled Glencairn’s voting shares, according to FCC records, profit from the new stations would flow through the company to the Smith family.

“David doesn’t build expensive newsrooms,” a former Sinclair executive says. “If anything, he’s the anti.”

Sinclair used the tactic to gobble up stations in markets where it already had a presence. A veteran broadcast industry lawyer who has worked on many sidecar agreements told me it was no coincidence that Sinclair chose a minority broadcaster as its business partner. Under President Jimmy Carter, the FCC had introduced policies designed to encourage greater minority ownership of TV stations, and according to the lawyer, it cited that goal in its decision approving an early Sinclair deal with Edwards. Critics including the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters called these arrangements a sham and a front and accused Sinclair of violating the law. Edwards said Sinclair’s opponents were standing in the way of a successful African American businessman and “should be ashamed of themselves.”

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated the industry and unleashed a wave of consolidations, and Sinclair embarked on a buying spree, quickly gaining a reputation for its low-budget approach. “David doesn’t build expensive newsrooms,” a former Sinclair executive says. “If anything, he’s the anti.” According to another former colleague, “Public service journalism was not what he really focused on.”

By the late 1990s, Sinclair had grown its portfolio to almost 60 stations reaching 24 percent of households, making it among the largest broadcasters in America. Smith had also taken the company public, and its revenue soared past $500 million. “We’re forever expanding—like the universe,” Smith told the Baltimore Sun.

Even as the company boomed, David Smith and his brothers kept a low profile. Smith sometimes drove a pickup to work and wore jeans to business meetings. There was no corporate PR team. It helped that it wasn’t Sinclair’s name viewers in Rochester or Indianapolis saw every evening on the 10 p.m. news—it was the four letters and familiar faces of their local TV station. Closer to home, though, David Smith earned a bit of notoriety for his arrest in the mid-1990s after soliciting a prostitute in a police sting. He was allegedly receiving a blow job in a company-owned Mercedes when he was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor. Smith struck a deal with prosecutors requiring Sinclair stations to produce segments highlighting the state’s drug courts. His employees, in other words, would fulfill his community service for him.

Between 1997 and 2002, the Smith brothers donated nearly $200,000 to Republican candidates and committees in Maryland and at the federal level.

Sinclair’s rapid growth also caught the attention of the FCC, and in proceedings surrounding a round of proposed acquisitions in 1998, the commission examined the company’s use of sidecar agreements. Edwards provided the FCC with incorrect figures related to the purchases, leading the commission to wonder “whether he is actively involved” in his company. In the end, the commission fined Sinclair $40,000 for exercising too much control over Glencairn’s acquisitions, in violation of US law. Glencairn was also fined $40,000. As Michael Copps, a Democratic commissioner, wrote in a blistering opinion, the fine “merely points out that lines have been crossed, while allowing Sinclair to run over these lines and to continue its multiple ownership strategy.”

The FCC’s scrutiny caused Smith and his brothers to see the value of friends in Washington. Between 1997 and 2002, the Smith brothers donated nearly $200,000 to Republican candidates and committees in Maryland and at the federal level. The Smiths were also generous with Democrats, when they were in a position to help: One former Sinclair executive told me the company’s political giving “was primarily FCC-driven. Who could be friendly? Who could help them with the FCC?”

Bob Ehrlich, a Republican congressman whose district was home to Sinclair’s headquarters north of Baltimore, received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations. The congressman sat on a subcommittee overseeing the commission and sent sharply worded letters to the FCC in 2001 asking after the status of the proposed 1998 acquisitions. The commission ultimately approved every deal but one in Sinclair’s favor.

“The management of WBFF Fox 45 stands behind the president,” the anchor said, “and our nation’s leaders in the vow that terrorism must be stopped. If you agree, make your voice heard.” It was days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and soon all 62 of Sinclair’s stations would deliver messages like this, to millions of viewers around the country.

The fine, an FCC commissioner wrote,“merely points out that lines have been crossed, while allowing Sinclair to run over these lines and to continue its multiple ownership strategy.”

The attacks brought politics into the company’s newsrooms in a new way. “It was a great place to work until 9/11,” says Kirk Clyatt, a former anchor and weather reporter at WBFF in Baltimore. “It was almost like you could feel the wind change.” The on-air editorials were unprecedented for Sinclair. While scripts noted that the messages represented the views of “station management,” there was unrest in Sinclair’s newsrooms among a generation of journalists trained to be neutral and nonpartisan. That wasn’t how Sinclair executives saw it: If they were guilty of anything, one executive said, it was “being patriotic during a time of tragedy.”

But the company followed up with more—and more strident—political content. As the major networks rushed to fill airtime with retired generals after the attacks, Sinclair found its own pundit in Mark Hyman. A former Navy intelligence officer who had worked as a Sinclair lobbyist, Hyman went on WBFF in the weeks after the attacks to cheer on President George W. Bush and scold other media for their unfair and unpatriotic coverage. Sinclair soon elevated Hyman to be its chief commentator and designated his editorials, titled “The Point,” as must-runs. Hyman’s segments were taped near Baltimore and distributed nationwide to Sinclair’s stations, which were required to knit them into their local news broadcasts. For the viewer, the effect could be jarring: one minute, traffic and sports. The next, a centrally recorded, straight-to-camera clip of, say, Hyman visiting Iraq after the 2003 US invasion in search of “good news,” or a Hyman commentary claiming that “terrorist leaders would dearly love to see President Bush replaced with Senator Kerry.”

Hyman and David Smith both argued that the national networks’ news operations and cable giants like CNN were too liberal, and that Sinclair could balance out the negative, anti-war, anti-Bush bias of its competitors. (Meanwhile, Sinclair pursued buying affiliates of those same networks.) During a deposition in a colleague’s contract dispute, Stuart Zang, a former producer for Hyman, said he was told to read three books of right-wing media criticism after he was hired: Slander by Ann Coulter, Bias by Bernard Goldberg, and a tome called Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism.


Jesse Lenz

In 2002, Ehrlich, Sinclair’s congressman, took on Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor, in the Maryland governor’s race. As former WBFF political reporter Jon Leiberman later told GQ, newsroom staffers at Sinclair’s flagship station were tasked with taking down Townsend. “All of our resources were used to go after her,” he recalled. After she lost the election, the Baltimore Sun reported that Ehrlich had failed to report a series of discounted flights he received during the campaign from a helicopter company controlled by J. Duncan Smith, a potential violation of campaign finance laws. The scandal was dubbed Choppergate, and Ehrlich voluntarily repaid $26,600.

That year, Sinclair created a national news desk to produce segments for stations’ local newscasts, and in 2003 it followed up with a Washington bureau. Sinclair’s political leanings gained more widespread attention in 2004 when Ted Koppel planned to spend an episode of Nightline reading the names of soldiers killed in Iraq. Sinclair ordered its ABC affiliates not to run the show, saying it was “motivated by a political agenda.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called Sinclair’s move “unpatriotic.” During that year’s presidential campaign, Sinclair sparked a national uproar when it planned to air Stolen Honor, a controversial documentary widely seen as a hit piece on then-Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the Democratic nominee. Amid the backlash, Mark Hyman compared news networks that refused to report Stolen Honor‘s allegations about Kerry’s anti-Vietnam War activism to Holocaust deniers. After Sinclair’s DC bureau chief described the documentary to a Baltimore Sun reporter as “biased political propaganda with clear intentions to sway this election,” the company fired him and sued him for breach of contract.

Mark Hyman compared news networks that refused to report Stolen Honor’s allegations about Kerry’s anti-Vietnam War activism to Holocaust deniers.
The outcry drove the company’s stock price to its lowest point in three years. In the end, Sinclair retreated, instead airing a more balanced piece on the use of documentary films during political campaigns that included excerpts of Stolen Honor.

The fracas brought the company unprecedented attention: “Keep your eye on Sinclair Broadcasting,” New York University professor and media critic Jay Rosen wrote the day after the 2004 election, adding that Sinclair represented “a new kind of media company—a political empire with television stations.”

Sinclair receded from the headlines during the Obama years. The Great Recession battered the company’s balance sheet, pushing it to the brink of bankruptcy by mid-2009. But unlike some of its competitors, Sinclair avoided collapse through heavy cost-cutting, a refinancing of its debts, and an influx of political ad spending unleashed by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. Sinclair had recovered enough by 2011 to embark on a multiyear shopping spree. By 2015, it had acquired another $3 billion worth of TV properties, for a total of 151 stations—more than twice as many as it had owned or operated a decade earlier.

The company’s size was again drawing scrutiny from a Democrat-controlled FCC. When Tom Wheeler took the commission’s helm in 2013, he aimed at a loophole that allowed broadcasters to avoid the FCC’s consolidation limits by dividing the audience figures of their UHF stations—found on channels 14 and higher—in half. The rule dated to the mid-’80s, when viewers favored lower-numbered stations. But it became even more outmoded after 2009, when broadcast television went digital and technical requirements forced most lower-numbered stations to start transmitting in UHF. Wheeler believed broadcasters were abusing the rule to gobble up stations while staying under the national ownership cap of 39 percent. So he eliminated it, throwing up a barrier to future growth by Sinclair.

“Sinclair sees news first…as a profit center and second as a vehicle for promoting its interests.”

But when he stopped the use of the sidecar agreements that Sinclair had pioneered to operate multiple stations in the same market—”a pure scam,” he put it, echoing statements in FCC documents—he ran up against the company’s allies in Congress. One of Maryland’s US senators, Barbara Mikulski, a recipient of almost $20,000 in Smith family donations and a stalwart liberal who was then the chair of the Appropriations Committee, barred the commission from spending any money to enforce Wheeler’s ruling, according to a person familiar with the move.

Sinclair enthusiastically embraced the chance to influence the 2016 election and perhaps sway its viewers to select a president likely to install commissioners favorable to the company’s agenda. “Sinclair sees news first and foremost as a profit center and second as a vehicle for promoting its interests,” warns Schwartzman. “And its political interests promote its business interests.”

The company’s first choice was not Donald Trump, but Dr. Ben Carson, the retired Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon. Carson was something of a celebrity in Baltimore and had appeared at Sinclair-sponsored town hall events in the region. A precampaign hourlong biographical infomercial about Carson was carried on multiple Sinclair stations, and WJLA, the Sinclair station in DC, ran an ad promoting it.

The infomercial was the work of Armstrong Williams, a close friend and political consultant to Carson who was also a broadcaster and a Sinclair business partner. A gadfly of sorts in Republican circles, Williams hosted a talk show in the 2000s carried by Sinclair and interviewed Bush administration officials. Williams later admitted he had received more than $180,000 from Bush’s Education Department to promote its policies—a disclosure he never made on air or in his syndicated columns. The Government Accountability Office eventually concluded that the arrangement violated a federal ban on “covert propaganda*.”

[[COVERT PROPAGANDA -- https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/covert_propaganda, Covert propaganda refers to media materials prepared by a government agency and then disseminated by a non-government outlet with the source undisclosed.[1] What defines covert propaganda materials is that they are “misleading as to their origin.”[2] The source must be intentionally misleading, however, and not just due to administrative carelessness. The agency in question must desire that its authorship be obscured, and it must take steps to ensure that obscurity. ]] SEE ALSO: “https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/under-bush-a-new-age-of-prepackaged-tv-news.html.”

(Williams admitted no wrongdoing but paid back $34,000.) The scandal did nothing to tarnish Williams in the eyes of Sinclair CEO David Smith—former Sinclair employees who worked with Smith and Williams describe the two as good friends. In 2015, Sinclair sold three stations in cities where it ran the risk of violating the duopoly rule to a company owned by Williams, while inking local management agreements to continue their operations.

Former staffers on Ben Carson’s presidential campaign say Carson, Armstrong Williams, and Sinclair were deeply intertwined.

Former staffers on Carson’s presidential campaign say Carson, Williams, and Sinclair were deeply intertwined. Carson’s staff planned an elaborate campaign rollout event in Detroit, Carson’s hometown, complete with a church choir and 1,700 guests brought in for the day. National media flew in from across the country to cover it.

At the rehearsal the night before, Doug Watts, who was Carson’s communications director, remembers a reporter approaching him with a peculiar question. “Why are we here?” the reporter asked. “You just announced.” Watts chuckled. “Ben’s going to make his announcement tomorrow,” he said. No, the reporter said, Carson just announced in an interview on the Sinclair station in Palm Beach, Florida.

In fact, the interview—pretaped weeks earlier at Carson’s home in West Palm Beach—was airing on Sinclair stations across the country, from Florida to Ohio to South Carolina. Jeff Barnd, Sinclair’s national political correspondent, had landed the sit-down with Williams’ help. “He did it so that he could give Sinclair this exclusive,” Watts says. (Williams declined to comment for this story.)

It wasn’t the only time Williams and Sinclair used their massive reach to benefit the Carson campaign, Watts says. Once, Watts told Williams he was searching for archival footage of riots in Baltimore to use in a campaign spot. The clips Watts had found were all marked for editorial use only, meaning they couldn’t air in a political ad. Williams offered to help and soon sent four or five archival clips from a Sinclair station in Baltimore. When Watts pointed out that the footage had the same restrictive labels, he remembers Williams telling him, “You go ahead and use it. I’ll take care of it.” Several times, Watts recalls Williams secreting Carson away to gently question him on a range of subjects, triggering concerns that Williams would air the tapes on stations he owned: “I said, ‘Armstrong, that’s what’s called an in-kind contribution,'” Watts remembers. “It seems to me it puts your [broadcast] license in jeopardy. It puts the campaign in jeopardy.”

“It’s math,” Kushner reportedly said, boasting about the benefits of reaching Sinclair’s massive audience.

After Carson dropped out of the race in March 2016, Sinclair threw its weight behind Trump. A Politico story detailed how Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, speaking in a postelection off-the-record session, described an arrangement where Sinclair had aired interviews with candidate Trump without commentary in exchange for greater access to the campaign. “It’s math,” Kushner reportedly said, boasting about the benefits of reaching Sinclair’s massive audience. While Sinclair says Kushner was describing a standard offer made to both campaigns to conduct extended interviews with local anchors, a Washington Post analysis found that Sinclair stations ran 15 “exclusive” interviews with Trump, 10 with running mate Mike Pence, and 10 more with campaign surrogates. By contrast, the company’s stations aired zero interviews with Hillary Clinton, five with Sen. Tim Kaine, Clinton’s pick for vice president, two with Chelsea Clinton, and none with any other top surrogates. According to the Post, Sinclair higher-ups suggested questions with a strongly anti-Clinton bent to local reporters.

Just before the campaign, Sinclair took steps to expand its style of news online. In August 2015, the company bought the name and technology from the remains of a failed San Francisco startup, Circa News*. The new venture’s announcement promised an “independent digital news site” for readers who “value raw content, differing perspectives, and personalization.” Circa would produce stories for the web and video segments for Sinclair’s stations.

Sinclair’s pick to run Circa was a former Washington Times editor named John Solomon, who has a conservative slant and a history of writing stories damaging to Democratic politicians. Ten current and former Circa staffers told me that Solomon pitched the new venture as a down-the-middle, nonpartisan news organization: “BuzzFeed with a brain,” is how one remembers Solomon putting it. But as the presidential campaign ramped up, staffers, who asked to remain anonymous because they signed nondisclosure agreements or fear retribution, say Circa adopted a notable rightward tilt and an increasingly hostile stance toward Clinton. Solomon hired a former Republican National Committee spokesman named Raffi Williams to be a political reporter, though he previously had little formal journalism experience. Williams, the son of former NPR reporter turned Fox News pundit Juan Williams, is now a spokesman at Secretary Ben Carson’s Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The Big Power of the Small Screen

Weeks away from the election, Solomon told staffers he had landed a major scoop, one that—as he breathlessly wrote in a draft script—”will make you forever question how politics works.” The scoop, it turned out, came from James O’Keefe, the conservative provocateur best known for undercover sting videos that toppled the progressive activist group ACORN. (He was later sentenced to three years of probation and 100 hours of community service for entering a US senator’s office under false pretenses.)

O’Keefe had spent six months running a hidden-camera investigation into Scott Foval and Robert Creamer, both Democratic operatives. Solomon brokered a deal to edit O’Keefe’s raw footage into a multipart documentary. An early version of a script Solomon wrote reads like a bad political thriller. “Politics in Washington has always had its dirty trick operatives, both on the Republican and Democratic sides, though none have been chronicled with the level of detail that the undercover journalists captured,” the script says. “It’s the sort of stuff you’d expect to hear from the diabolical Frank Underwood’s mouth during an episode of House of Cards, except this is real life.”

After Creamer learned he’d been targeted by O’Keefe and that Circa was involved, his lawyers warned Sinclair that they believed O’Keefe and his team faced legal liability for the tactics used to infiltrate his firm, and that Circa could be liable for coordinating with O’Keefe. After legal discussions, the Circa series never ran.

O’Keefe eventually released some edited footage on his own site, purportedly showing Foval and Creamer discussing hypothetical ways to stir up violence at Trump rallies. Creamer, then a contractor at the Democratic National Committee, told me he pulled out of the contract to avoid causing any harm to the Clinton campaign. (Foval was laid off.) In June, Creamer and his firm sued O’Keefe and his team, alleging violations of local and federal wiretap laws, among other claims. O’Keefe says the lawsuit is “frivolous.” When I spoke to Creamer in September, he told me his lawyers had been unable to serve one of the defendants, Allison Maass, who had created a fake identity to get an internship and shoot undercover footage at Creamer’s firm. Maass’ Twitter bio doesn’t list her residence, but it does list her current employer: Circa.

David Smith was fired up. On the day after Trump’s election, he spoke at a media conference at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan. Trump’s victory, Smith told the audience, was “a really serious opportunity to seek complete deregulation” of broadcasting. “If Donald Trump is as deregulatory as he suggests he is,” he said, “we’re going to be the first industry in line.”

On the day before Trump’s inauguration, Smith, Armstrong Williams, and Sinclair’s new CEO, Chris Ripley, had a meeting in Washington with FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai. In his five years on the commission, the 44-year-old Pai, an ex-Verizon lawyer and staffer to former Sen. Jeff Sessions, developed a reputation as a sharp and well-spoken advocate for the industry, fighting Wheeler’s steps to limit concentration.

“If Donald Trump is as deregulatory as he suggests he is,” David Smith said, “we’re going to be the first industry in line.”

Pai was no stranger to Sinclair. Just two months before, he had spoken at the company’s annual meeting for general managers at the Four Seasons in Baltimore, taking a short private meeting with Smith afterward. (What he told the managers is unclear: Sinclair declined to comment for this article, and Pai’s office said it couldn’t locate any remarks or notes for the event in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.) In the January meeting, Smith, Williams, and Ripley argued that the sidecar agreements utilized by Sinclair were vital to the industry, and to a minority broadcaster like Williams. (In March, after opening with a brief disclaimer that he owned TV stations regulated by the FCC, Williams hosted Pai for a friendly interview on his show The Right Side, which airs on Sinclair stations.)

When Trump took office, he elevated Pai to serve as chairman. Since then the commission has made one move after another that has benefited Sinclair. Two weeks into the administration, the FCC tossed out what remained of Wheeler’s policy clamping down on sidecar agreements. Then, in April, the FCC voted to bring back the ultra high frequency discount, setting the groundwork for Sinclair’s purchase of Tribune Media’s 42 stations. Without the discount, the combined company is estimated to reach 72 percent of households—far above the 39 percent limit. Sinclair officials note that the new FCC changes benefit many companies, not just Sinclair. At an industry luncheon, Ripley praised the chairman’s work to cut regulation: “Thankfully, we’ve got Chairman Pai.”

Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley praised the FCC chairman’s work to cut regulation: “Thankfully, we’ve got Chairman Pai.”

As the company expands, it also seems to be growing more assertive about its politics. Stations are required to air terrorism alerts daily. Sinclair responded to criticism of its must-run Boris Epshteyn segments by tripling the number of times stations are mandated to air them each week. In March, the company’s executive in charge of news, in a must-run segment of his own, cribbed a favorite term of Trump’s when he lashed out at unnamed national media outlets for peddling “fake news.”

The FCC is reportedly investigating a 2016 incident where Sinclair newscasts aired months of paid segments promoting a Utah hospital without proper disclosure. Smith has reportedly said the violation could cost the company millions of dollars. Travis LeBlanc, a former head of the FCC’s enforcement bureau, warns it could also delay the Tribune deal: “It would be out of the ordinary and inappropriate for the commission to approve any merger—or any transaction—if there is an unresolved enforcement investigation.”

While Sinclair awaits federal clearance for the purchase, there are already rumblings that the FCC will soon consider further deregulation of its duopoly rule and ownership cap—changes that could unleash yet more consolidation on the airwaves. Which, according to Ripley, is precisely what Sinclair wants. “We think the industry needs to consolidate to two or three large broadcasters, and really just one to two strong local players in each market,” he told shareholders in August. If the FCC rolls back the regulations, he said, it could create “significant savings” for companies like Sinclair—while allowing them to spread their message to more Americans than ever before.

Additional reporting by Russ Choma.



“THEY HAVE SUCCESSFULLY LOCKED DOWN THE COMPANY WHERE ANYONE INSIDE — WE HAVE SEEN SOME MEMOS THAT HAVE BEEN LEAKED THREATENING ANYONE WHO DARES TO SPEAK OUT TO ANYONE PUBLICLY ABOUT THIS,” HE TOLD CNN.”

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/former-sinclair-news-director-promos-proof-life-hostage-videos
Ex-Sinclair News Director: Promos ‘Equivalent To A Proof-Of-Life Hostage Video’
By Nicole Lafond | April 4, 2018 10:28 am

A former news director for a Sinclair-owned TV station in the Midwest said this week that the “must-run” promotions — like the one that went viral featuring local anchors denouncing fake news — have been commonplace for years.

But the infamous “one-sided news stories” script was the worst example the 14-year local news producer has seen. The producer, Aaron Weiss, told CNN on Wednesday that the videos were “equivalent to a proof-of-life hostage video.”

“My heart broke, my heart broke for the anchors who were forced to do that,” Weiss told the network, after publishing an op-ed about Sinclair in The Huffington Post on Monday.

“I know several of them and as someone who grew up in the local news business — my mom was an anchor in Tucson, Arizona for 30 years and I imagined if she had been forced to do something like that when I was a kid and forced to make a decision about their ethics versus feeding her family and keeping her job in a business she loves,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine doing it and so my heart goes out to all those anchors who were basically forced to do the equivalent of a proof of life hostage video.”


Deadspin
✔
@Deadspin
How America's largest local TV owner turned its news anchors into soldiers in Trump's war on the media: https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/how-americas-largest-local-tv-owner-turned-its-news-anc-1824233490 …

4:11 PM - Mar 31, 2018
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In 2013, Weiss joined a news station in the Midwest as news director, after working as a producer in several larger markets on the West Coast for years. Sinclair bought the station not long after he joined the team and he was rapidly introduced to the company’s “must-run” segments, which he described as “pre-produced packages” that came from corporate along with a script for the anchors to read. He said the pieces “barely passed as journalism,” but couldn’t be changed by producers or anchors.

“We had to air them whether we wanted to or not,” Weiss wrote in his Huffington Post op-ed. “Sinclair knows its strongest asset is the credibility of its local anchors. They’re trusted voices in their communities, and they have often been on the air for decades before Sinclair purchased their stations.”

At first, Weiss said his station tried to bury the packages in the early morning news, but were quickly warned by executives that they had to feature them at a more prominent time.

“I didn’t last long after that,” he wrote.

Weiss said he decided to speak out because he knew people inside the Sinclair-owned stations had, essentially, been issued a gag-order.

“They have successfully locked down the company where anyone inside — we have seen some memos that have been leaked threatening anyone who dares to speak out to anyone publicly about this,” he told CNN.

On Tuesday, FTV Live was first to publish a leaked memo that was sent to staff at the KATU news station in Portland, warning staff that they were not allowed to answer “any questions” or “get into any discussion with callers” or speak with the press about the promotional segments. The general manager for the region, Robert Truman, warned that there would be repercussions if they did.

“I will also remind you that giving statements to the media or sharing negative information about the company can have huge implications,” he said, according to the memo.


View image on Twitter

Samantha Swindler
✔
@editorswindler
This is what reporters at KATU news in Portland are dealing with from Sinclair Broadcasting. Note the second-to-last graph.

5:42 PM - Apr 2, 2018
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CNN and The Oregonian have both confirmed that the memo was sent out to the Portland station’s staff from Sinclair’s Truman. TPM attempted to reach Truman and Sinclair’s corporate spokesperson Scott Livingston Tuesday, but neither returned requests for comment.

In a press release on Monday, Sinclair claimed that the promotional segments “served no political agenda, and represented nothing more than an effort to differentiate our award-winning news programming from other, less reliable sources of information.”

Read the response from Sinclair below: GO TO WEBSITE FOR THIS.



FOR MORE INFORMATION ON WHAT THESE SINCLAIR “MUST RUNS” CONSIST OF, WATCH THIS PBS VIDEO AND COMMENTARY.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNhUk5v3ohE



https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-defends-sinclair-again-blasts-news-media-as-fakers
Trump defends Sinclair again, blasts news media as ‘fakers’
Politics Apr 3, 2018 10:24 AM EDT

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is starting the day with tweets criticizing broadcast news media as “fakers.”

Trump tweeted Tuesday that the “‘Fakers’ at CNN, NBC, ABC & CBS have done so much dishonest reporting that they should only be allowed to get awards for fiction!”

Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
The Fake News Networks, those that knowingly have a sick and biased AGENDA, are worried about the competition and quality of Sinclair Broadcast. The “Fakers” at CNN, NBC, ABC & CBS have done so much dishonest reporting that they should only be allowed to get awards for fiction!

6:34 AM - Apr 3, 2018
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The president is also defending the Sinclair Broadcast group following news reports about a video of dozens of Sinclair news anchors reading a script expressing concern about “fake stories.” Sinclair owns nearly 200 local TV stations and has ordered its anchors to read a statement expressing concern about “one-sided news stories plaguing the country.”

Trump tweeted that “The Fake News Networks, those that knowingly have a sick and biased AGENDA, are worried about the competition and quality of Sinclair Broadcast.”



ON THE SUBJECT OF “COVERT PROPAGANDA*,” GEORGE W. BUSH WAS IN THE CROSS HAIRS OF THE PRESS FOR THIS SAME THING. “PREPACKAGED NEWS,” UNMARKED AS TO WHO WROTE AND PUBLISHED IT, OR WHO IT IS MEANT TO HELP POLITICALLY, IS THE SUBJECT THE LAST SEVERAL DAYS. GO TO GOOGLE AND READ THIS FOR YOURSELF, BUT IT DOES SHOW THAT WHAT SINCLAIR IS INVOLVED IS THE VERY SAME SIN/CRIME THAT GEORGE W BUSH WAS. I DO THINK THAT SOME SERIOUS OPPOSITION TO THEIR PRACTICES WILL CAUSE THEM AT LEAST TEMPORARY PAIN, EVEN IF IT DOESN’T TOTALLY STOP WHAT THEY EMPLOY AS A BUSINESS MODEL, BECAUSE THE OUTCRY AGAINST THEM NOW REALLY IS VERY STRONG.

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/under-bush-a-new-age-of-prepackaged-tv-news.html
Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News
By DAVID BARSTOW and ROBIN STEINMARCH 13, 2005

[SEE ALSO: http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-ban-spreads-government-made-news-to-americans/
U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans
BY JOHN HUDSON | JULY 14, 2013, 7:06 PM]

Photograph -- Broadcasting Board of Governors / Washington Forum

For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government’s mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?

Until this month, a vast ocean of U.S. programming produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks could only be viewed or listened to at broadcast quality in foreign countries. The programming varies in tone and quality, but its breadth is vast: It’s viewed in more than 100 countries in 61 languages. The topics covered include human rights abuses in Iran, self-immolation in Tibet, human trafficking across Asia, and on-the-ground reporting in Egypt and Iraq.

The restriction of these broadcasts was due to the Smith-Mundt Act, a long-standing piece of legislation that has been amended numerous times over the years, perhaps most consequentially by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. In the 1970s, Fulbright was no friend of VOA and Radio Free Europe, and moved to restrict them from domestic distribution, saying they "should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics." Fulbright’s amendment to Smith-Mundt was bolstered in 1985 by Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky, who argued that such "propaganda" should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. "from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity."

Zorinsky and Fulbright sold their amendments on sensible rhetoric: American taxpayers shouldn’t be funding propaganda for American audiences. So did Congress just tear down the American public’s last defense against domestic propaganda?

BBG spokeswoman Lynne Weil insists BBG is not a propaganda outlet, and its flagship services such as VOA "present fair and accurate news."

"They don’t shy away from stories that don’t shed the best light on the United States," she told The Cable. She pointed to the charters of VOA and RFE: "Our journalists provide what many people cannot get locally: uncensored news, responsible discussion, and open debate."

A former U.S. government source with knowledge of the BBG says the organization is no Pravda, but it does advance U.S. interests in more subtle ways. In Somalia, for instance, VOA serves as counterprogramming to outlets peddling anti-American or jihadist sentiment. "Somalis have three options for news," the source said, "word of mouth, al-Shabab, or VOA Somalia."

This partially explains the push to allow BBG broadcasts on local radio stations in the United States. The agency wants to reach diaspora communities, such as St. Paul, Minnesota’s significant Somali expat community. "Those people can get al-Shabab, they can get Russia Today, but they couldn’t get access to their taxpayer-funded news sources like VOA Somalia," the source said. "It was silly."

Lynne added that the reform has a transparency benefit as well. "Now Americans will be able to know more about what they are paying for with their tax dollars — greater transparency is a win-win for all involved," she said. And so with that we have the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which passed as part of the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, and went into effect this month.

But if anyone needed a reminder of the dangers of domestic propaganda efforts, the past 12 months provided ample reasons. Last year, two USA Today journalists were ensnared in a propaganda campaign after reporting about millions of dollars in back taxes owed by the Pentagon’s top propaganda contractor in Afghanistan. Eventually, one of the co-owners of the firm confessed to creating phony websites and Twitter accounts to smear the journalists anonymously. Additionally, just this month, the Washington Post exposed a counter-propaganda program by the Pentagon that recommended posting comments on a U.S. website run by a Somali expat with readers opposing al-Shabab. "Today, the military is more focused on manipulating news and commentary on the Internet, especially social media, by posting material and images without necessarily claiming ownership," reported the Post.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


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