THE SINCLAIR BROADCASTING READ ON TRUTH, JUSTICE, AND THE AMERICAN WAY
BY LUCY WARNER
APRIL 4, 2018


THE TERM “FREE PRESS” ONLY APPLIES TO THE SINCLAIR HIERARCHY – ALL OTHER VIEWS ARE UNAMERICAN.

SINCLAIR'S MANDATORY ANCHOR SCRIPTS AND THEIR “AMBITIONS” AS A COMPANY TO BE THE SPOKESPERSONS TO ALL RIGHTIST POLITICIANS, IF THEY ARE WEALTHY ENOUGH TO PAY WELL. MAYBE I'M WRONG, BUT I DON'T THINK SO. SURELY SINCLAIR IS BREAKING SEVERAL LAWS, HERE.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/02/598794433/video-reveals-power-of-sinclair-as-local-news-anchors-recite-script-in-unison
AMERICA
Video Reveals Power Of Sinclair, As Local News Anchors Recite Script In Unison
April 2, 201811:47 AM ET
CAMILA DOMONOSKE

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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One company. One script. Many, many voices.

A video published by sports news site Deadspin over the weekend revealed dozens of TV anchors from Sinclair Broadcast Group reciting the same speech warning against "biased and false news."

It was the latest show of the vast reach of a company that owns local TV stations across the country and has long been criticized for pushing conservative coverage and commentary onto local airwaves.

Sinclair required local anchors to record promos where they denounce "the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country" and say that "some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control 'exactly what people think.' "

Sinclair says it is simply warning viewers about the dangers of fake news circulating on social media.

But media critics see a powerful company using local journalists to parrot one of President Trump's most consistent talking points — an allegation that the mainstream media cannot be trusted.

Sinclair Tells News Anchors To Denounce 'Fake News'

Sinclair owns more than 190 TV stations across the country, more than any other media company, and is seeking to acquire dozens more by purchasing Tribune Media. The Federal Communications Commission has allowed the company to consolidate more power and centralize more news production.

Last spring, reporting on the company's ambitions, NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik wrote, "If history is any guide ... Sinclair Broadcast will also pull news coverage on those stations in a more conservative direction and explore giving full rein to those beliefs on a national platform."

The broadcasting behemoth has a consistently conservative, pro-Trump bent and has required local stations to run right-wing commentary segments, including segments by former Trump advisers. (Last summer, John Oliver lambasted that practice in a segment on his HBO show, Last Week Tonight.)

And Sinclair has previously denounced fake news stories in a segment, recorded by a news executive, that local stations were instructed to air last year.

But instructing local TV anchors to read a script like this in their own voices is a new development.

Deadspin's video stops at a line that it repeats again and again, to drive home the video's critical message: "This is extremely dangerous to our democracy."

The viral video was released after multiple media outlets spent weeks reporting on Sinclair's use of the scripts.

CNN's Brian Stelter first broke the story in early March, reporting that local journalists were uncomfortable with being forced to read promos "echoing President Trump's inflammatory rhetoric about 'fake news.' "

Folkenflik spoke with Sinclair's top news executive a week later. Scott Livingston told David that Sinclair's "reporting is nonpartisan" — although the company has been frequently accused of favoring Republicans in news coverage. Livingston said that the news anchor script is "a warning about fake news circulating on social media."

Jane Hall, a professor at American University and a former media critic for Fox News, said that the promo is clearly supporting Trump's condemnation of most news outlets.

"It's naked in the sense that it's forcing people in the news to read something that is a corporate piece of propaganda, in my opinion," she told David.

Then, on Friday, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published the script in its entirety.

But it's one thing to see a script; another thing to see it recited in unison. On Friday, the liberal website ThinkProgress released a video showing some samples of local stations airing the segments. And on Saturday, Deadspin published the video that took the Internet by storm.

Sinclair, which is headquartered outside Baltimore, told the Baltimore Sun the script is referencing fabricated stories like "Pope Endorses Trump" or conspiracy theories like "Pizzagate."

"That's the goal of these announcements: to reiterate our commitment to reporting facts in a pursuit of truth," Livingston told the Sun. "We consider it our honor and privilege to deliver the news each night. We seek the truth and strive to be fair."

As David has previously reported, Sinclair "takes not only an ideological line but at times a partisan line. It's been a very pro-Trump line."

Trump has tweeted in support of the media group, calling other news networks "among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with" and saying "Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC."


Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
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.

9:28 AM - Apr 2, 2018
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It was a fairly typical Trump tweet — and exactly the kind of message that critics hear echoed in Sinclair's mandatory anchor scripts.



HOW DOES SINCLAIR ENFORCE ITS’ GAG RULE?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/sinclair-broadcasting-contracts-make-it-expensive-tv-news-anchors-quit-1099293
APRIL 03, 2018 1:19pm PT by Eriq Gardner
Can Sinclair Force TV Anchors to Pay Up If They Quit?

The company uses a liquidated damages clause for voluntary termination and also reserves the right to fire anchors for expressing political viewpoints or suffering disabilities that prevent a pleasant personal appearance.
For those disgruntled news anchors at Sinclair Broadcast Group's 200 television stations across the U.S., quitting isn't easy. Many are reportedly embarrassed and irate at having to recite "fake news" promos ordered by a management team that's widely viewed as favoring the Donald Trump administration. Some might wish to leave. A look at Sinclair's standard employment agreement, obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, illustrates how departing the Sinclair team is hardly a cheap or simple proposition.

According to the contract, a Sinclair employee who voluntarily terminates his or her contract must immediately pay liquidated damages in an amount equal to 40 percent of employee's then annual compensation multiplied by a "percentage equal to the greater of (a) twenty-five percent, or (b) the percentage of the current contract year remaining after such termination."

So, for example, take a news anchor making $200K a year. A stand against these promos by quitting might incur a price tag of $25,000.

It gets worse.

The contract contains a non-compete provision that prohibits the departing Sinclair employee from working at another radio or television station for 180 days after termination. Even if was possible to get another anchor position — Sinclair's proposed acquisition of Tribune stations would shrink the pool of potential jobs — this represents a further barrier.

Of course, some states like California prohibit restrictions hindering employee mobility and there could be good legal arguments why in other states, contractual handcuffs are presumptively illegal.

Kate Gold, an employment lawyer at Drinker Biddle, says that the enforceability of non-competes vary sharply from state to state. As for the liquidated damages provision, Gold says it's highly unusual. "You can't make someone work for you," she says. "You can pursue damages, but to have it pre-determined at 40 percent sounds like a penalty."

The standard Sinclair employment agreement also contains other eyebrow-raising provisions.

For instance, in a section titled "politics," employees agree that at no time will they "directly or indirectly express ... personal political viewpoints during any broadcast."

Sinclair employees also agree to a morals clause allowing for termination with cause for anything that brings the company into "public disrepute, contempt, scandal, or ridicule, or which shocks, insults, or offends the community, or which casts doubt upon Employee's journalistic fairness or credibility or which reflects unfavorably upon Employee, Employer or the Station, as reasonably determined by Employer."

Then, there is contractual language pertaining to one's personal appearance.

It might not be shocking that Sinclair anchors agree to maintain a "certain physical appearance" and get authorization in writing to "materially alter" from such appearance. Nor surprising that Sinclair is allowed to request reasonable changes to one's "hair color, facial cosmetics, and/or removal of facial hair."

But how about an employee who suffers a disability?

According to the contract, Sinclair is allowed to fire an employee when it's determined the employee has suffered a disability, "including but not limited to any which limits Employee's ability to prevent [sic] a pleasant personal appearance and a strong, agreeable voice."

Sinclair is allowed to determine whether the employee is then "unable to perform the essential functions of Employee's job even with reasonable accommodation."

Some of this could lead to legal disputes, but then, there's just one more big problem for Sinclair anchors wishing to quit.

Not only does the contract specify arbitration to adjudicate any dispute arising or relating to the employment agreement, but also allows Sinclair to recover "costs and expenses including, without limitation, reasonable attorney's fees."



THIS IS THE MOST INFORMATION-FILLED ARTICLE I’VE SEEN ON THIS SUBJECT. I DO LIKE SPECIFICS. ONE OF THE INTERESTING THINGS IT SAYS IS THAT WHEN SINCLAIR TAKES OVER, AND THE PROGRAMMING SHIFTS RIGHTWARD, THE STATIONS DO IN FACT LOSE READERSHIP, ESPECIALLY IN DEMOCRATICALLY INCLINED AREAS; BUT THEY KEEP UP THE “CONSERVATIVE” DRUMBEAT ANYWAY. WHY? COULD IT BE THAT SOMEBODY ELSE IS MAKING UP THEIR LOSS OF PROFITS WITH UNDER THE TABLE PAYMENTS? I THINK THIS IS REASONABLE GROUNDS FOR A CONGRESSIONAL OR SPECIAL PROSECUTORIAL EXAMINATION.

IT DOES ACTUALLY LINK WITH THE TRUMP PATTERN OF CHEATING, AND IF IT WERE PROVEN TRUE, IT MAY BE/SHOULD BE ILLEGAL. I THINK IT MAY BE TIME NOW FOR THE BROADCASTING OF FALSE INFORMATION FOR ANY REASON, OTHER THAN A TRUE MISTAKE, SHOULD BE CRIMINALIZED, AND THAT INCLUDES LIBEL OR FALSE ADVERTISING. THERE IS A TENDENCY THAT I’VE SEEN FOR INFRACTIONS WHICH ARE LESSER ISSUES THAN ATTEMPTED MURDER OR RAPE OR THEFT TO BE TREATED AS UNIMPORTANT, WITH NO CRIMINAL PENALTY.

FOR SUCH THINGS TO BE LEFT UP TO THE VICTIM TO HAVE TO SUE FOR REDRESS IS UNFAIR. LAWSUITS ARE TOO EXPENSIVE FOR MOST PEOPLE WHO AREN’T WELL-TO-DO, AND THAT PRODUCES VERY REAL INJUSTICE BASED ON FINANCES. WHY ARE THERE NO LAWS MADE ABOUT THAT? IF TRUMP WERE FOUND GUILTY OF TRANSFERRING MONEY OVER TO THE NEWS STATIONS THROUGH SINCLAIR TO BUY THEIR GOOD PUBLICITY, HE WOULD SURELY BE IMPLICATED, BUT IS IT ILLEGAL? IT GOES ON ALL THE TIME, SO IT PROBABLY ISN’T. IF WE WOULD CHANGE THAT, THE OVERALL LEVEL OF “DIRT” IN POLITICS WOULD REDUCE NOTICEABLY. WE NEED PENALTIES.

DO THE SINCLAIR BROADCASTING’S EDITORIAL MANDATES SUCCESSFULLY SWING PUBLIC OPINION TO THE RIGHT? DEFINITELY! THERE IS A CERTAIN KIND OF PERSON WHO DOESN’T QUESTION WHAT THEY HEAR VERY MUCH, AND ESPECIALLY TO THE POINT OF ACTUALLY PUTTING OUT SOME EFFORT TO FIND OUT WHAT THE SITUATION IS. THAT’S WHY THE MANIA OVER “FAKE NEWS” IS ACTUALLY HARMFUL. IT CAN CAUSE REAL DAMAGE.

REMEMBER THE PIZZAGATE MATTER SEVERAL YEARS AGO WHEN A WILD-EYED RADICAL RIGHTIST SHOT ONE OR MORE PEOPLE OVER A RIDICULOUS FALSE STORY THAT THE RUSSIAN FAKE NEWS FACTORY PUT OUT TO HARM HILLARY CLINTON. A FAIR NUMBER OF PEOPLE MAY BELIEVE SOME AMAZING THINGS, SO FOR A POWERFUL GROUP LIKE SINCLAIR TO LIE, LIE, LIE IS A HARM THAT SHOULD BE PUNISHED, IN MY VIEW.

AS TO WHETHER SINCLAIR IS TRULY “CHEATING” FOR CANDIDATES LIKE TRUMP, SEE THE FOLLOWING COMMENT: “IN THE MOST RECENT CAMPAIGN, WJLA, AND SINCLAIR STATIONS AROUND THE COUNTRY, GAVE A DISPROPORTIONATE AMOUNT OF NEUTRAL OR FAVORABLE COVERAGE TO CANDIDATE DONALD TRUMP COMPARED WITH HIS RIVAL, HILLARY CLINTON, ACCORDING TO INTERNAL DOCUMENTS SUPPLIED BY PEOPLE AT WJLA,” FARHI WROTE.

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/3/17180020/sinclair-broadcast-group-conservative-trump-david-smith-local-news-tv-affiliate
Sinclair, the pro-Trump, conservative company taking over local news, explained
Sinclair reaches 40 percent of households — and soon will reach 72 percent.
By Dylan Matthews@dylanmattdylan@vox.com Apr 3, 2018, 2:20pm EDT

This month, the 193 local TV affiliates owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group began running a series of promotional segments, warning of a scourge of “fake news” promoted by “members of the media [who] use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think.’”

The segments, which echo the Trump administration’s anti-media rhetoric, are eerily uniform across all Sinclair affiliates, so much so that Deadspin’s Timothy Burke was able to edit them together into a supercut showing dozens of Sinclair anchors saying the exact same words.

The video is just the most recent example of Sinclair stations’ strong partisan tilt. A recent paper by Emory University political scientists Gregory Martin and Josh McCrain found that when Sinclair buys a local station, its local news program begin to cover more national and less local politics, the coverage becomes more conservative, and viewership actually falls — suggesting that the rightward tilt isn’t enacted as a strategy to win more viewers but as part of a persuasion effort.

A report from the Pew Research Center last year found that 37 percent of Americans say they frequently rely on local TV for news — not far behind the 45 percent of Americans who say they get news from Facebook, and ahead of the 33 percent who say they look at news websites and apps, the 28 percent who watch cable news, the 26 percent who watch national nightly news, and the 18 percent who still read print newspapers.

That makes the partisan tilt of the hundreds of local TV stations that Sinclair owns concerning, especially since the company’s channels reach 40 percent of Americans.

The uproar over Sinclair’s “fake news” editorial prompted furious rebuttals from the company and an intervention from the president, who spoke up in the company’s defense while attacking CNN and NBC — a somewhat confusing comparison for him to make, as Sinclair owns some 25 NBC affiliates:


Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
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.

9:28 AM - Apr 2, 2018
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But Sinclair’s anti-media promos are hardly an aberration. Sinclair has been steadily growing and acquiring new affiliates in more and more markets for decades. It has, in the process, spread a conservative message enforced by mandates on local news anchors, including requirements that they air partisan commentaries by figures like Boris Epshteyn, Sinclair’s chief political analyst and a former Trump aide in both the 2016 campaign and the White House.

Here, for example, is Epshteyn condemning cable news anchors for their use of “curse words” when reporting on President Trump’s description of Haiti and much of Africa as “shithole” countries. “The allegation is that President Trump said the word once in a private meeting. How is it okay to repeat it and splash it onscreen hundreds of times?” Epshteyn asks.

Epshteyn produces as many as nine conservative, pro-Trump segments a week. The “Bottom Line With Boris” videos are “must-runs,” meaning all 193 Sinclair stations must broadcast them.

Another recent Sinclair segment featured former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka ranting about the “deep state” and its efforts to sabotage Trump, and was produced by Kristine Frazao, a former reporter and anchor for the Russian propaganda network RT.

The company is set to become more powerful with its planned $3.9 billion acquisition of Tribune Media, which would add 42 stations to Sinclair’s 193 existing affiliates. The deal has to secure approval from the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Sinclair has already agreed to sell a number of stations to stay below the FCC’s requirement that TV station owners reach no more than 39 percent of US households with TVs.

Let me repeat that: Sinclair is hitting the absolute maximum level of viewer reach that a broadcasting conglomerate of its kind is allowed to have under federal regulations. The 39 percent figure is actually an underestimate because the FCC undercounts reach provided by ultra-high frequency (UHF) channels; measured accurately, the Tribune deal will let Sinclair reach 72 percent of households, Mother Jones’s Andy Kroll notes.

And unlike Fox News, Sinclair programming comes to people on local TV, on channels affiliated with ABC or NBC or CBS or Fox, many of which have existed in their communities for decades before Sinclair bought them. Millions of viewers of those stations have no idea that they’re watching conservative editorials rather than normal local news, which gives Sinclair incredible power to persuade viewers of conservative ideas.

How Sinclair Broadcast Group became a national giant
Sinclair Broadcast Group began in 1971 with a single station, WBFF in Baltimore, under the company’s founder and owner, Julian Sinclair Smith. In 1986 he ceded control to his four sons, who proceeded to, as GQ’s Wil Hylton noted in a superb 2005 profile of the company, “purchase an unprecedented number of television stations, develop their own programming, and presto, create a network.”

Hylton notes that the Smith family’s strategy was unprecedented in broadcasting. Typically, companies that bought local TV affiliates would specialize in one or two national networks: You’d own, say, 15 to 20 ABC affiliates across different cities, or 15 to 20 NBC affiliates, or maybe a few of each. That way, you only had to deal with one or two national networks for negotiating payments, time slots, and the like.

The Smiths, however, chose to buy up stations indiscriminately. The 193 Sinclair stations include ones affiliated with NBC, ABC, Fox, CBS, The CW, and Univision alike.

Sinclair also began to develop workarounds to FCC regulations barring ownership of more than one commercial station per media market. The Smith brothers had their mother create a shell company to buy up stations that Sinclair legally could not, “promptly leasing the broadcast rights to Sinclair under a loophole known as a Local Marketing Agreement,” as Hylton explains. The FCC figured out what they were doing and fined Sinclair as well as the shell company, but enabled them to keep going with that loophole in the future.

That ability to work around limitations on owning multiple networks in a given city or region has helped fuel Sinclair’s incredible growth. Mother Jones’s Kroll reported that Sinclair is set, after the Tribune deal, to own two or more stations in 69 media markets across 46 of the 50 states. It will have at least one station in 39 of the top 50 media markets and seven of the top 10.

Sinclair’s regulatory gamesmanship was aided, Hylton writes, by its cultivation of relationships with influential politicians. The Smith brothers became prolific fundraisers for their local Congress member, Robert Ehrlich of Baltimore County, Maryland.

“In 1998, Sinclair had filed a request with the FCC to purchase fifteen new stations, some located in cities where the company already owned stations, but FCC commissioner Michael Powell had been reluctant to approve the deal,” Hylton writes. “Ehrlich fired off a series of letters to Powell, mincing no words. He reminded Powell that he was a member of the House committee that oversees the FCC and its budget, questioned whether Powell had been influenced by liberals like Jesse Jackson, and threatened that if the Sinclair request was not approved soon, he would ‘not hesitate to call for a congressional investigation.’ By the end of the year, fourteen of the fifteen purchases were approved.”

When Ehrlich ran for governor in 2002, the Sinclair networks backed him extensively, including by instructing their Baltimore station’s reporters to dig up dirt on the Democratic candidate, Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, according to Hylton.

The Smiths also gave Ehrlich a helicopter to use, free of charge, in violation of state campaign finance rules; Ehrlich, once he won the election, would pay Sinclair $60,000 from the state budget to produce a set of ads that “featured the new governor popping up in people’s homes to help with household chores,” as Hylton put it.

Sinclair has been broadcasting conservative programming for well over a decade
Both Kroll and Hylton date the Smith brothers and Sinclair’s interest in politics to their desire to curry favor with the FCC in the late 1990s, as their aggressive approach in acquiring networks began to attract regulatory scrutiny.

But somewhere along the way, the Smiths appear to have become conservative true believers. In response to a request for an interview from New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi this past November, David, the principal Smith brother in the company, declined to talk, writing in an email, “The print media is so left wing as to be meaningless dribble [sic] which accounts for why the industry is and will fade away. Just no credibility.”

This pivot began to deeply influence Sinclair programming in the first term of George W. Bush’s presidency. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Sinclair ordered news anchors at its local affiliates to read statements in support of Bush and the war on terror: “The management … stands behind the president and our nation’s leaders in the vow that terrorism must be stopped.”

That same year, the company began airing “The Point,” a regular commentary segment from political analyst Mark Hyman, an archconservative prone to saying things like, “Terrorist leaders would dearly love to see President Bush replaced with Sen. [John] Kerry.” (“The Point” ceased airing in 2006, but Hyman returned for regular commentaries in 2010 and continued them until early this year, when he stepped aside for health reasons.)


In 2004, Sinclair announced it would send its own reporting team, including Hyman, to Iraq to report on “good news” stories that the mainstream media was ignoring as the country descended into anarchy and civil war in the wake of the American invasion. “There might be real accomplishments for the U.S.-led occupation, said Mark Hyman, Sinclair’s vice president for corporate affairs, but if so, they are being drowned out by the constant barrage of stories about guerrilla actions against coalition troops,” David Folkenflik, then of the Baltimore Sun, reported.

In April 2004, Sinclair refused to air an episode of Nightline in which Ted Koppel read the names of every American killed in Iraq, saying the episode “appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq.”

Later that year, it ordered its affiliates to air a documentary called Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal attacking Democratic nominee John Kerry’s anti-Vietnam War activism and claiming that it contributed to torture of American POWs in North Vietnam; after a public outcry, Sinclair eventually backed down and only aired five minutes of the documentary, plus four minutes of the pro-Kerry documentary Going Upriver.

But in its personnel decisions, the company stuck by its anti-Kerry message. When Sinclair’s Washington bureau chief, Jon Leiberman, called the attempt to air Stolen Honor “biased political propaganda,” he was promptly fired.

Sinclair was back in the news the first week of 2005, when USA Today’s Greg Toppo revealed that Armstrong Williams, a prominent black conservative commentator, had taken $240,000 from the Department of Education in exchange for commentary praising the No Child Left Behind Law. The Government Accountability Office would eventually issue a report declaring the payments illegal.

Sinclair was a key part of the scheme; Williams aired an interview of Education Secretary Rod Paige (his financial patron) on Sinclair networks, as well as interviews with then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Vice President Dick Cheney. While other news outlets cut ties with Williams, Sinclair maintained the relationship after the controversy. Williams even did Sinclair a solid in 2013 when he purchased two TV stations from them to help them avoid FCC ownership rules — while signing deals to make sure Sinclair was still in control.

In 2008, Sinclair raised eyebrows yet again for running an ad attempting to tie then-Sen. Barack Obama to Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. The ad declared that Obama was “friends with Ayers” and that his “political career was launched at Ayers’s home.” (It wasn’t.) This was an ad, not Sinclair original programming — but, the New York Times’s Jim Rutenberg noted, it was an ad that Fox News and CNN declined to run due to legal concerns.

In 2010, Sinclair faced another uproar for running sleazy political ads — this time, a 25-minute infomercial from the National Republican Trust PAC called “Breaking Point.” Here it is, in three parts:

The ads, narrated by E.W. Jackson — an ultra-right-wing minister who has decried yoga as leading to Satanism, and who’d later achieve attention as the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia in 2013 — paints a picture of President Obama as a pawn in a shadowy conspiracy meant to “mak[e] billionaire George Soros rich.”

Obama, Jackson says, “does not view America from an America-centric perspective, but instead from an outsider’s point of view, often with hostility.” The video shows clips meant to imply that Obama is a Muslim (like him saying “as-salamu alaykum,” telling an interviewer that “if you took the number of Muslim-Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world,” and saying, “Islam is a part of America”) with sounds of Muslim prayers and chants of “Allahu akbar” in the background.

“During his presidential election, he wound up with a record-shattering $750 million in his campaign,” Jackson said of Obama. “To this day, he refuses to report from whence it came. One reason might be that some of it originated from the terrorist group Hamas, which also endorsed Obama for president.” (If you want to see from whence it came, here’s the publicly released data on donations to Obama. Hamas is not one of the sources.)

The company repeated these kinds of shenanigans in 2012, releasing a vehemently anti-Obama and pro-Mitt Romney half-hour news special on the Monday before Election Day and airing it on affiliates in Columbus and Dayton, Ohio, and West Palm Beach, Florida. Unlike the 2010 infomercial, this was official Sinclair news programming, not an ad.

Here’s a viewer-recorded video of a portion of the special:

In recent years, the company has dipped even further into conservative advocacy. In 2015, it hired former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson to host a weekly news show; Attkisson had become a prominent Benghazi conspiracy theorist, and claimed that the government had hacked her laptop to delete her writing (it appears that she was mistaken and her backspace key was stuck).

In 2016, the company initially backed Ben Carson, Armstrong Williams’s longtime friend and confidant, as Mother Jones’s Kroll notes. “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,” Kroll writes; the infomercial, predictably, was produced by Williams.

After Carson left the race, the company’s loyalties shifted to Trump. In December 2016, Jared Kushner told a group of business executives that the Trump campaign had cut a deal with Sinclair for better coverage. In exchange for more access to Trump, “Sinclair would broadcast their Trump interviews across the country without commentary, Kushner said,” Politico’s Josh Dawsey and Hadas Gold reported. “Kushner highlighted that Sinclair, in states like Ohio, reaches a much wider audience — around 250,000 listeners — than networks like CNN, which reach somewhere around 30,000.”

In a statement, Sinclair denied the deal was unusual and claimed it had offered a similar deal to the Clinton campaign.

Sinclair’s purchase of Tribune Media in 2017 sparked rampant speculation that Sinclair had ambitions to challenge Fox News as a national force in conservative media, perhaps by taking Tribune’s WGA America (which reaches 80 million households, to Fox News’s 90 million) and turning it into a news network. The hiring of Trump loyalist Boris Epshteyn seemed to further these suspicions, and the “fake news” script only further suggests the company is growing more ambitious in its national programming.

Last Week Tonight and John Oliver captured the overall feel of Sinclair’s coverage, including Epshteyn’s contributions, in a segment last July about the Tribune purchase:

Local stations purchased by Sinclair are in for an alarming change

Last year, the Emory political scientist Greg Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu released a landmark paper finding that Fox News’s consistently pro-Republican, anti-Democrat coverage meaningfully shifted votes. They estimated that if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008.

Moreover, they found that the company wasn’t maximizing its viewership. It could have been slightly less conservative and gotten better ratings as a result. But instead, it sacrificed viewership to increase its power of persuasion by ramping up the amount of conservative argumentation viewers see, even if doing so cost some Democratic viewers. CNN, by contrast, just set programming in ways that maximized viewership.

Sinclair is doing something similar. Martin and Emory’s Josh McCrain, in a more recent paper, used the fact that Sinclair sequentially buys up affiliates to measure the impact of its ownership on local programming. In particular, they looked at the effect of Sinclair buying 14 new stations in 2017. The results they found were perhaps predictable, but no less striking.

The 14 stations “moved to the right on the ideological dimension … relative to other stations in the same media markets,” they write. “This change brought the acquired stations closer in line with the pattern of coverage at existing Sinclair-owned stations, at the cost of a small decline in viewership relative to the stations’ same-market competitors.”

The viewership decline, they found, was concentrated in Democratic-leaning areas. But it was relatively small, in the scheme of things. “The vast majority of viewers watching before the acquisition date continued to watch afterwards, despite the substantial changes in political content,” Martin and McCrain write. “For these non-switching viewers, the ideological valence of their news diet lurched rightwards following the acquisition.”

Paul Farhi of the Washington Post reached similar conclusions in an investigative piece on what happened when Sinclair bought WJLA, an ABC affiliate in Washington, DC. “In the most recent campaign, WJLA, and Sinclair stations around the country, gave a disproportionate amount of neutral or favorable coverage to candidate Donald Trump compared with his rival, Hillary Clinton, according to internal documents supplied by people at WJLA,” Farhi wrote.

The network was asked to air “must run” stories about Hillary Clinton’s email server and her personal health, but no similar stories about Trump’s tax records. There was, however, a must-run story called “Donald Trump Reflections of 9/11” and a puff piece about women campaigning for Trump.

Many Sinclair viewers don’t know their local news is peddling a conservative message

Say what you will about Fox News, but its viewers more or less know what they’re getting. That doesn’t mean it’s not persuasive — Martin and Yurukoglu’s study demonstrates that it is — but it has been a solidly conservative channel more or less since its inception. Its viewers mostly know that, and its staffers definitely know that.

Part of what’s so concerning about the Sinclair Group is that it’s taking over existing local TV brands, often to the consternation of those stations’ staff. CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that anchors at Sinclair-owned stations responded angrily to the “fake news” script that went viral last week, decrying it as “manipulative” and saying things like, “At my station, everyone was uncomfortable doing it.” Yolanda Harris, one of the anchors behind the biased 2012 election special, tweeted in response to criticism, “didn’t have a choice dude” and “I need my job.”

Mary Nam, an anchor at the Sinclair-owned KOMO in Seattle, also took to Twitter to express her frustration in response to Trump’s tweet about Sinclair:


Mary Nam
✔
@Mary_Nam
Actually, this isn't funny at all.
None of it.
When media giants gobble up local news stations, there are repercussions. And since you brought it up first this morning, will your admin green light the Tribune buyout? https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/980799183425802240 …

12:15 PM - Apr 2, 2018
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A news director at one station wrote in an all-staff email, quoted by Stelter: “Let me be absolutely clear here ... These MUST Run. If they do not, my job is on the line. I don’t say that to scare you by any means but I do say this so you understand how serious SBG is about this project.” (Even so, a Madison, Wisconsin, station is refusing to air the promo, in spite of the danger that puts the affiliate in.)

One Sinclair journalist messaged the LA Times’s Matt Pearce to show a provision in their contract requiring them to pay back 40 percent of their base pay, times the amount of time left in the contract, should they quit. That kind of provision isn’t just punitive — it’s arguably illegal and unenforceable. But it could certainly intimidate staffers out of leaving, even if they strongly disagree with the editorial choices their owner makes.

The past month has seen a deserved focus on the possible role social media, particularly Facebook, plays in spreading political misinformation. But Sinclair is a good example of how political media, including outright conspiracy theorizing, can spread through more mundane and less technologically novel means too. Local news isn’t sexy or new. But it’s a mainstay of millions of Americans’ news diets. And Sinclair is profoundly changing it in a way that helps the Republican Party and the Trump administration.



FOR MORE ARTICLES ON THIS SCARY BIT OF THE TRUMP INFLUENCE, SEE THE FOLLOWING.

Sinclair Broadcast Group is a Media Monopoly Thanks to ... - LawNewz

https://lawandcrime.com/legal.../sinclair-broadcast-group-media-monopoly-thanks-bill...
1 day ago - Sinclair Broadcast Group was only able to grow so large because of Bill Clinton's neoliberal presidency--specifically the Telecommunications Act of 1996. ... Since the law passed, however, and after a series of expertly-timed-and-crafted court challenges (the first was initiated by Fox Television), this section ...

Ready for Trump TV? Inside Sinclair Broadcasting's Plot to Take Over ...
https://www.motherjones.com/.../ready-for-trump-tv-inside-sinclair-broadcastings-plot...
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, ... 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.

Sinclair Broadcast Group - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group
Sinclair Broadcast Group is a publicly traded American telecommunications company that is controlled by the family of company founder Julian Sinclair Smith. 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 ...
Owner‎: ‎Smith family (controlling) Number of employees‎: ‎8,400 (2016)
Net income‎: ‎$245.3 million USD (2016) Founder‎: ‎Julian Sinclair Smith

Terms & Conditions - Sinclair Broadcast Group
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These Website terms and Conditions (sometimes called “Agreement”) are a binding legal contract between you and the Sinclair Affiliate that operates this website (“we,” “us” or “our”) and governs your use of such website and any content made available from or through such website, including any subdomains thereof.

Sinclair's WGN fig leaf could seal its controversial Tribune Media pact ...
www.chicagotribune.com/.../ct-biz-sinclair-wgn-tricky-deal-robert-reed-0301-story.ht...
Mar 1, 2018 - Sinclair Broadcast Group plans to sell Chicago's WGN-TV and stations in New York and nine smaller markets to win federal approval of its proposed $3.9 billion ... In September, the FCC informed Sinclair the acquisition would exceed the legal national TV ownership limit and urged it to take steps to comply.

How Trump's FCC aided Sinclair's expansion - POLITICO
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/.../trump-fcc-sinclair-broadcast-expansion-24133...
Aug 6, 2017 - That followed POLITICO's reporting on a boast by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner that the president's campaign had struck a deal with the broadcast group for better media coverage. (Sinclair disputed the characterization, saying it was an arrangement for extended sit-down interviews that was offered to ...

Sinclair Broadcast's Tribune Media Deal Could Blow Up the ... - Fortune
fortune.com › Entertainment › Television
Jul 25, 2017 - Sinclair Broadcast Group's planned Tribune Media acquisition could alter the landscape of local television news. ... Trump adviser (and son-in-law) Jared Kushner reportedly told a group of executives ahead of last year's election that the Trump campaign had an agreement with Sinclair to provide access to ...

How Sinclair Broadcast Group made local news pro-Trump - NBC News
Video for SINCLAIR BROADCASTING SINCLAIR BROADCASTING LEGAL▶ 4:34
https://www.nbcnews.com/.../how-sinclair-broadcast-group-made-loc...
The little-known local news giant Sinclair Broadcast Group forces its stations to run right-wing commentary ...
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