DOES SINCLAIR BROADCASTING WANT DONALD TRUMP TO BE “PRESIDENT FOR LIFE” ?

…Sinclair Broadcast Group Headquarters in Maryland

 

Trump lied when he said: “Sinclair Broadcasting had been improperly criticized for being biased.”

 

During these times of bizarre happenings, I was amazed when the news teams from 193 TV stations across the nation, they all presented the same speech on the air.  (A speech that could have been written by Donald Trump) 

 

The speech was a shot at biased and false news that has become so common on some TV stations, and also offered through many social media sites.  And the speech was presented by each of the 193 station as if they had all gotten together and practiced doing it in the same tempo.  So much so, that the Comcast/NBC network took excerpts from each of the 193 stations and played them all together at the same time on national TV.  It almost sounded like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir when the speeches were all played together at the same time.

 

As it turns out, it was a speech from a script written by the independent owner of the 193 TV stations, Sinclair Broadcast Group.  And the 193 stations are located all over the country from Seattle to Phoenix to Washington DC.

 

It was all so strange, that 193 local news stations across the United States, and their dozens of news anchors gave the same speech to their combined millions of American viewers.

 

The script was presented as a “must run” item to their stations by the Sinclair Group, and they are the country’s largest independent broadcaster.

 

Last week, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper published a copy of the speech and reported that employees at a local news station there, KOMO, were unhappy about the script which Sinclair had said they were “Required to read on the air”.  CNN had reported on it on in early March and they said Scott Livingston, the senior vice president of news for Sinclair, had read the same speech for a segment that was distributed to outlets over a year ago.

 

The union that represents news anchors did not respond to requests for comment.

 

Dave Twedell of the International Cinematographers Guild, who is a business representative for photojournalists (but that does not include news anchors) at KOMO in Seattle and KATU in Portland, Ore., said Sinclair told journalists at those stations they could not discuss the company’s activities with outside news media.

 

Although Sinclair is the country’s largest broadcaster, Sinclair is a very low-profile company, so they are not a household name.  Their viewers are mostly unaware of who owns their local news station and a number of TV critics have accused Sinclair of using its stations to advance their right-wing agenda.

 

Of course, immediately after the forced speech at the Sinclair stations was made public by the NBC and MSNBC networks, President Trump just had to tweet his support of Sinclair Broadcasting with this tweet:

 

“So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with", he also said that: Sinclair Broadcasting had been improperly criticized for being biased.”  He also called CNN and NBC: the most “Fake News”.

 

Sinclair regularly sends video segments to the stations that are referred to as “must-runs,” and they can include content like terrorism news updates, commentators speaking in support of President Trump or speeches from company executives like the one from Sinclair’s Executive Vice President, Scott Livingston.

 

“We work very hard to be objective and fair and be in the middle,” Mr. Livingston told The New York Times last year. “I think maybe some other news organizations may be to the left of center, and we work very hard to be in the center.” 

 

 

I don’t think that being in such strong support of President Trump is anything close to “being in the center”.

 

Telling newscasters to present Sinclair’s material themselves is what you would expect from a state owned communication’s operation like it is in Russia, not in the United States.  That is exactly how Ms.  Kirstin Pellizzaro, a doctoral candidate at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, how she felt about her experience as a producer at a Sinclair-owned news station in Kalamazoo, Mich., from 2014 to 2015.

 

The Michigan station had to air “must-run” segments that came from Sinclair. “Some of them were slanted, and biased,” Ms. Pellizzaro said. “Packages of this nature to personally present can make real journalists very uncomfortable.”

 

“We are focused on fact-based reporting,” Mr. Livingston has stated. “That’s our commitment to our communities. That’s the goal of these announcements: to reiterate our commitment to reporting facts in a pursuit of truth.”  That is a highly questionable statement from the Executive V.P..

 

But Ms. Pellizzaro said she can talk honestly about Sinclair more freely now, mainly because she is working in an academic atmosphere.  But when she and other journalists were at stations owned by Sinclair, they all felt pressured not to bite the hand that fed them.  “I hope people realize that the journalists are trying their best, and this shouldn’t reflect poorly on them,” she said. “They’re just under this corporate umbrella and are required to give the owners opinion on the current politics, regardless of whether it’s true or not.”

 

Having 193 stations across the country that are required to present the station’s owners politics over real news and information, that is exactly how a democratic nation stops being a democracy.

 

And it’s going to get worse here in the US.

 

Sinclair has since been accused of using its connections with the Trump administration for easing current regulations on media consolidation. This is in an effort to expand its reach.  Sinclair is currently seeking approval from Trump’s Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission for a $3.9 billion deal to buy Tribune Media. 

 

This would just increase Sinclair’s politics on 43 more broadcast stations across the country.

 

Trump wants to be an authoritarian president like Vladimir Putin, it takes communications companies like Sinclair to make that a potential end result.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2018