• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Exclusive: Sinclair approaches Tribune Media about possible deal - sources

https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/how-americas-largest-local-tv-owner-turned-its-news-anc-1824233490

Here is another article on the Sinclair issue as soon as Sinclair is about to get the Tribune Owned stations this memo will be cited the most. Now Sinclair News Directors and General Managers are going to be on the Hot seat over their news content as this gets repeated in the top 10 markets (Note San Francisco and Atlanta are the largest TV Markets not affected by the Sinclair Deal)

You might remember Sinclair from its having been featured on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight last year, or from its requiring in 2004 of affiliates to air anti-John Kerry propaganda, or perhaps because it’s your own local affiliate running inflammatory “Terrorism Alerts” or required editorials from former Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, he of the famed Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that failed to mention Jewish people. (Sinclair also owns Ring of Honor wrestling, Tennis magazine, and the Tennis Channel.)

The net result of the company’s current mandate is dozens upon dozens of local news anchors looking like hostages in proof-of-life videos, trying their hardest to spit out words attacking the industry they’d chosen as a life vocation.

Not that any of it matters to Sinclair, which, with the help of a friendly federal government, is about to swallow up another 40 television stations—increasing its reach and its lead over competitors like Hearst and Scripps. The script, as transcribed by ThinkProgress based on the KOMO (Seattle) version, reads:

Hi, I’m(A) ____________, and I’m (B) _________________…

(B) Our greatest responsibility is to serve our Northwest communities. We are extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that KOMO News produces.

(A) But we’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.

(B) More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories… stories that just aren’t true, without checking facts first.

(A) Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’…This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.

(B) At KOMO it’s our responsibility to pursue and report the truth. We understand Truth is neither politically ‘left nor right.’ Our commitment to factual reporting is the foundation of our credibility, now more than ever.

(A) But we are human and sometimes our reporting might fall short. If you believe our coverage is unfair please reach out to us by going to KOMOnews.com and clicking on CONTENT CONCERNS. We value your comments. We will respond back to you.

(B) We work very hard to seek the truth and strive to be fair, balanced and factual… We consider it our honor, our privilege to responsibly deliver the news every day.

(A) Thank you for watching and we appreciate your feedback.
Click to expand...
 
Over at KIMA, Jake Taylor was forced to read a similar script. And at WKRC, and KGBT, and KGAN, and every other station that Sinclair owns. At least the anchors at KNDO and KNDU aren't forced to do this...and their news quality is better as a whole!
Sinclair defended themselves this morning... https://www.usatoday.com/story/mone...nchors-read-anti-false-news-screed/477531002/
Trump also tweeted support for Sinclair this morning as well. Yes, the same group that brings you 'Bottom Line with Boris'.
 
TheBigA said:
Yet he can't really name anything or anyone on Sinclair. And has never done an interview with them.

But as long as they don't say anything bad about him, they're not "fake."
Click to expand...

Trump did interview with Fox11 in Green Bay when he was running for President WWMT ran a clip of the interview saying this coming from our sister station from GB.
 
Yes, KOMO was airing Boris and Kristine Frazao 'must-runs' at 4:30 and 5AM several months ago. I did hear they were forced to air a Kristine Frazao segment during a recent 6pm newscast with that Sebastian Gorka guy. KIMA airs all its 'must-runs' during the regular newscasts; they have aired the 'terrorism alert desk' things at 11pm before. Thank god for NBC Right Now! A local station with decent news quality, that isn't forced to air 'must-runs' from their parent company.
 
http://www.newsweek.com/congress-candidate-joins-sinclair-boycott-pulling-campaign-ads-869060

Update a Democratic Congressional Candidate out of Kentucky is boycotting Sinclair Owned Stations in Kentucky in response to the Sinclair Video.

A Democratic candidate for Congress in Kentucky pulled her campaign advertisements from a television station owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group in light of its controversial fake news warning.

Amy McGrath, a retired Marine who faces a tough primary race, announced on Monday that she instructed her campaign team to remove ads on WDKY-TV, which Sinclair owns, as soon as possible.

Dozens of local news anchors were required to read a script warning of “biased and false news” that many considered similar to President Donald Trump’s rhetoric. The script noted that "some media outlets publish these same fake stories...stories that just aren't true, without checking facts first.”

“Sinclair’s corporate-mandated ‘must-read’ right-wing script on its nearly 200 television stations about ‘fake news’ is itself an extreme danger to our Democracy and eerily mimics the propaganda efforts that authoritarian regimes often use to control the media in their own country,” McGrath said in a statement.
Click to expand...


Wow the backlash gets bigger as Sinclair attempts to get KTLA Directly, WGN via associated party and WPIX to Cunningham.
 
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligence...an-entire-print-media-has-no-credibility.html

Now David Smith is on the spotlight over Sinclairs operations. Yes Smith will become a household name in the top 10 DMA's.

The print media is so left wing as to be meaningless dribble which accounts for why the industry is and will fade away. Just no credibility.”

Smith may not be as identifiable as Rupert Murdoch or Jeff Bezos, but he’s as powerful; his influence saturates American homes through the 193 television stations he owns or controls, peppered throughout 39 states, spanning from New York to California (though concentrated in the South and midwest).

Founded as the Chesapeake Television Corporation in 1971 by his father, Julian Sinclair Smith, his company began its expansion and changed its name to Sinclair Broadcasting Company in 1985, the year before the Fox Broadcasting Company was launched. David Smith and his brothers assumed control of the business; previously, David had been a partner at Ciné Processors, a bootleg porn manufacturer owned by the elder Smith’s company, the Commercial Radio Institute, according to a 2005 story in Rolling Stone. Fox News is usually given credit for the media-induced changes to the conservative movement, and to American politics more broadly, over the last two decades. But in the Trump era, Sinclair’s creeping domination has emerged more obviously.

The topic of some interest in the last year, in part due to a long segment on Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, Sinclair became the subject of horrified fascination in more mainstream outlets over the weekend, when Deadspin published a supercut of dozens of its anchors, from San Antonio to Michigan, reciting an anti-media script on the air.

The eerie video, in which dozens of well-coiffed men and women robotically read the same words and phrases into the camera in segments from last month, went viral, attracting tens of thousands of retweets and millions of views.

“We’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country,” the Sinclair script read. “Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.”

On Monday, 15 minutes before he was scheduled to host a breakfast reception for the White House Easter Egg Roll, President Donald Trump took a break from his central morning activities — needling China into a trade war and posturing for his anti-immigrant supporters — to defend Sinclair on Twitter. “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,” he said. “Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke.”
Click to expand...
 
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/20...anda-machine-but-were-going-to-need-your-help

Update an op ed is out calling for Sinclair to be Boycotted as a response to the recent video. But the article mainly focused on KOMO as an example in the article.
https://www.seattletimes.com/entert...ative-owner-sinclair-mandates-talking-points/




I caught it one evening last week, sandwiched between the weather and human interest stories. At first, I thought maybe it was a subtle rebellion against KOMO’s parent company, the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair—which is controlled by David Denison Smith, the son of the company’s founder—is an arch-conservative media giant. The company currently owns and operates 193 television stations that reach into 40 percent of households across the U.S., and their empire could soon grow much larger: The Federal Communications Commission is currently considering a nearly $4 billion dollar bid from Sinclair to purchase the Tribune Media Company, which would increase Sinclair’s market share to 233 television stations in 108 U.S. markets. That’s 73 percent of U.S. households, and the merger would include Q13, a KOMO rival in Seattle. If the merger is approved, KOMO may not even survive: Q13 is cheaper to run; unlike KOMO, its workers aren’t unionized; and the station hasn’t attracted national attention.

One of Sinclair’s more egregious oversteps as of late is forcing local television stations, including KOMO, to air “must-runs”: conservative talking points from people like Boris Epshteyn (a former senior advisor to the Trump campaign) disguised as news. In a recent segment, Epshteyn pronounced that the media gives too much coverage to Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who claims she was paid off to keep silent about an alleged affair with Donald Trump. In others, Epshteyn pontificates about gun control (he’s against it), work requirements for food stamps (he’s for them), and the midterm Senate elections, which, he says, favor Republicans. All of this is delivered as though it's not merely one man’s opinion, but actual fact.

Last month, KOMO was forced to run a segment on the "Deep State," a conspiracy theory that a clandestine group of U.S government and military officials are trying to undermine the federal government. That segment was produced by Sinclair's Kristine Frazao, a former reporter for state-run Russian propaganda network, RT.

Editorializing may be common on Fox News (and, for that matter, The Stranger), but KOMO is on the public airwaves, and theoretically non-partisan. Yet Sinclair—which was fined $13.3 million by the FCC last December for airing over 1,700 commercials designed to look like news broadcasts, as the Seattle P-I reports—has written bias into local anchors' scripts.

Another anchor told CNN, “I felt like a POW recording a message.”

This is hardly the first time a major media group has used propaganda to spread a political message. But when that message comes beamed into your home on the public airwaves, the effect is more insidious, according to Pam Vogel of progressive media watchdog group, Media Matters. “The most dangerous aspect of Sinclair’s local news propaganda is exactly that—it’s local,” Vogel says. “Local broadcasters are expected to devote a substantial portion of their daily news coverage to issues of local importance. Instead, Sinclair forced its local anchors to film and air this promotional segment dictated by Sinclair’s corporate offices and regularly requires its local stations to regularly devote airtime to other segments that have little to do with their communities but are instead focused on underscoring a Trump agenda. Sinclair is depriving local audiences of the information they actually need about their communities in favor of videos promoting xenophobia, conspiracy theories, and attacks against the press.”

Using these tactics, Sinclair has turned a valued local news source into a propaganda machine for the Trump administration, and, if the FCC approves the company’s bid for Tribune Media—and in all likelihood, it will—their control over what we see and absorb on the local news will only grow stronger. This is a problem. While younger audiences may have given up on local TV news, older people still watch it. And they vote.

Of course, while Sinclair may be forcing their staffers to read their propaganda live, they can’t make anyone work there. Sinclair’s on-air employees are union, represented by SAG-AFTRA, but, according to one union member I spoke to, there are no plans to strike. The same is true of IATSE Local 600, the union that represents off-screen staff. Sure, the staffers could always quit, but, as the Seattle Times' Mike Rosenberg pointed out, currently, 64 percent of open jobs on the primary job resources market for journalists are for Sinclair. Yes, by reading these scripts on-air, the anchors are complicit, but aside from changing industries, they don’t have many options left.

The lack of opportunities in journalism are part of the general downturn in the news industry thanks to the rise of the internet and the death of on-air and in-print ads. But it’s also a direct effect of media deregulation, which, under the Trump administration is only getting worse: For nearly 80 years, the FCC required that TV and radio stations actually be physically located in the communities they served. In October last year, the Republican-led FCC eliminated that rule. Now, “local” news can come from anywhere. At the time, Democratic FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said the agency was “paving the way for broadcast station groups, large and small, to terminate studio staff and abandon the communities they are obligated to serve.”

As a reporter, I cannot personally imagine myself reading a mandated, pro-Trump script on air (not that KOMO would ever hire me). It’s antithetical to everything I would have learned in journalism school had I actually gone to journalism school. But I don’t have kids or a mortgage or a disabled spouse or anything of the other things that might compel someone to stay in a job that they know is corrupt. And while some people are calling for KOMO staffers to quit, Sinclair would just replace them with people who have less moral compunction, or, if the Tribune merger is approved, simply shut KOMO down. That may still happen.

But that doesn’t mean KOMO and other Sinclair stations are a lost cause.

KOMO staffers may not be able to publicly speak out without fear of losing their jobs, but Sinclair survives on advertising. Local and national companies alike pay for on-air commercials as well as space on the KOMO website. And if companies decide they are no longer willing to advertise on a propaganda platform, this could have an impact. Look at Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News host and alleged serial sexual abuser who was fired after an advertiser boycott last year. In the midst of the boycott, O’Reilly went on Easter vacation with his family and never reappeared on air. It’s happening at Fox again now: Currently, Laura Ingraham, the Fox New host whose show was dropped by at least 15 advertisers after she attacked Parkland shooting survivors, is also on “Easter vacation” with her family. We’ll see if she ever comes back.
Click to expand...
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom