9 ms·

In my eyes, this is a clear set/spike play. A huge corporation, enabled by their corrupt allies in the FCC, buy up hundreds of "local" stations. They then use t

In my eyes, this is a clear set/spike play. A huge corporation, enabled by their corrupt allies in the FCC, buy up hundreds of "local" stations. They then use the local cred/reputation of these stations to suggest that fake news is rampant on other sources (not controlled by Sinclair). They then tilt the dialogue nation-wide. Meanwhile, the average citizen is unaware that their trusted local anchor is bought/sold, they lack education and resources to educate themselves, and they are pushed further towards whatever dialogue the Sinclair executives are paid to push them towards. Does anyone from either side of the aisle consider a national corporation owning local stations and forcing scripts down their throat a good thing for the marketplace of ideas?

meri_dian 9y ago
How is that any different from major news organizations like CNN with a national reach clearly pushing biased anti-Trump news constantly? It's funny: Trump attacks CNN for being fake, biased news, then CNN responds by focusing all of their negative reporting on Trump, becoming exactly what Trump says they are. People would have had much more respect for CNN if they had stuck to the middle path in the face of Trump's insults. We should not turn a blind eye towards some instances of bias in media simply because they reinforce our own values and beliefs.
- nitrogen 9y ago
  Instead of derailing with "you too", can we focus on one thing at a time? National news programs are a separate issue from secretly biased local news.
  - meri_dian 9y ago
    CNN doesn't stand up and say "we're devoting our reporting resources to all things anti Trump, this is our bias, it's not secret". They simply report the news they choose to report. Just like Sinclair. People watch the news hoping to get an accurate depiction of reality. When only one side of a multifaceted situation is reported on, the depiction becomes distorted. It's never OK to do this, regardless of whose side you're on.
    - ModernMech 9y ago
      All news is based. Anyone telling you otherwise (that they are fair and balanced and unbiased) is lying to you. I don't need CNN to explicitly tell me their biases, because they are not my only source of news. It's not CNN's job to make sure i get unbiased news. It my job to make sense of biased news and weave it into a consistent mental model of the world. This let's me do things like watch CNN and Fox News and recognize when they're not telling me the full story. That's the only way to fight this kind of thing.
      - mnemonicsloth 9y ago
        If all news is biased, then what Sinclair is doing should be no big deal. They have a message they're pushing, just like everybody else. Do you believe that? And if everybody has a bias, it also shouldn't be a big deal for me to ask you: What's yours?
        ModernMech 9y ago
        It's one thing to put your message out there without having to constantly inform everyone you're biased, as CNN does. It's quite another to put your message out there and insist that everyone else is biased and therefore unfair and untrustworthy. This is what Fox News and Sinclair are doing. They don't want you to watch anything else, because it gives away the con. > What's yours? That's the thing about bias: It's multifaceted, and often subconscious. I could list some biases I'm suspicious I have, but this list would be incomplete and inaccurate.
        jimbokun 9y ago
        If they had to put a disclaimer in front of every local news anchor saying "the following content was produced by Sinclair Corporation in collaboration with President Trump", there would not be a problem. Just like we do with other kinds of political advertisements. The problem is not the bias. The problem is the deception about who is responsible for the content. And yes, this falls into the same category as government employees in St. Petersburg masquerading as US citizens while publishing political propaganda.
  - wanderer2323 9y ago
    That's not derailing, you are trying to split hairs to stifle discussion. Global media is pretty clearly biased against the current administration. It seems that Sinclair is the asymmetrical response. Discussing them in the larger context of the US news is completely valid.
    - ams6110 9y ago
      It's hilarious. Just like Facebook privacy issues only blew up when it might have benefited Trump, but it was fine when Obama used that data (on a much larger scale), it's funny that NYT is suddenly paying attention to this coordinated reporting campaign when they and the national TV media parrot Media Matters all day, every day. It's easy to find a dozen examples of national TV talking heads all using the same phrases and vocabulary to report on some pro-left or anti-right issue.
      - deleted 9y ago
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      - deleted 9y ago
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      - larkost 9y ago
        The data that the Obama campaign used, and the one that the Trump campaign may have used (it is clear they had it, unclear that they used it) were very different both in collection and in scope. The Obama campaign asked supporters which of their FaceBook contacts they thought were likely to be receptive to messages from the team, and only collected the FaceBook handles. The information shared with the Trump campaign was collected (not by the Trump campaign) was far more reaching than just the FaceBook name, including a lot of personal information both about the people who installed the "personality test" app, and the personal information of all of their FaceBook "friends". Trying to equate these two is just not honest. Separately I would expect the same phrasing and vocabulary to emerge in the media. They are all talking to the same general pool of sources, and listening to each other. What I do not expect (and smacks of authoritarianism) is for them to all be reading from the exact same script.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  Well, for one: CNN isn't getting a sweet new FCC head honcho to shape policy to benefit them. Second: do you understand the difference between a free press and a propaganda machine, right? One goes against the government's views, the other one pushes it.
  - meri_dian 9y ago
    "One goes against the government's views, the other one pushes it." No, that's not it. A free press is "free" because it's unconstrained by a Government or capricious regulation, not because it "goes against the government's views". Sometimes members of a free press will support the government, other times they won't. It's not a priori virtuous to go against the Government's views. Sometimes the Government is right and sometimes it's not. Like everyone else.
    - dguaraglia 9y ago
      I'd agree with you, except for this: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/trump-campaign-sinclair-broadcasting-jared-kushner-232764 https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/trump-campaign-sincla...
    - digitaltrees 9y ago
      Your definition of free press ignores the impact of government involvement in the press and preferential treatment it confers on specific organizations. Where the government favors one media/press organization and gives preferential treatment, every non-preferred media outlet is less free because they are constrained in ways the preferred outlet is not. You're right it's not inherently virtuous to go against the Government's views. But it is inherently bad to push government views in exchange for preferential treatment which is what appears to be happening here and with the National Enquirer. If you are concerned about a free press, you should be equally concerned about the commingling of government and press such that the government captures certain media properties and converts them to state run media. Free press means a separation of government and press; any governmental involvement damages a free press.
    - fmihaila 9y ago
- pasbesoin 9y ago
  CNN is a network. It is not station ownership. Stations have obligations in return for their licensing. Some of which require them to serve the public good. Local newscasting falls in that category. Sinclair is turning that "public good" into propaganda. This is counter to the license terms. At least, in my opinion. Maybe we'll see that addressed, in court, at some point. There are also marketshare caps, created to prevent this kind of bias from gaining dominance of the broadcast market. Sinclair has been lobbying and buying its way towards circumvention of those caps. Numerous studies indicate that, with all the changes in media, many people still go to their local broadcast news station for their news, and that they have a higher level of trust in it than in other sources. Arguably, when you turn on CNN or Fox -- networks, that cable and satellite providers can choose to carry along with however many other channels they want to sell you -- you know what you're getting. This, by contrast, is a creeping menace of bias, masked as your trusted local news source. (And as other "public service" broadcasting. Whereas people reasonably argue that the demonstrated bias to one political agenda, as well as the masking of the source of said programming, is not "public service".)
- mcphage 9y ago
  > It's funny: Trump attacks CNN for being fake, biased news, then CNN responds by focusing all of their negative reporting on Trump, becoming exactly what Trump says they are. CNN reporting negatively on Trump doesn't make them "fake". He's a bad president and a bad leader; reporting on that means you're telling the truth. Fake mean lying, not reporting truth you don't want to hear.
  - gwbas1c 9y ago
    Have you read their editorials? They're so biased and poorly written that I can no longer regard CNN as a good news source. It's a case of "two wrongs don't make a right." Lowering reporting standards because the other side lowered reporting standards means we have no good news. Not being able to trust the media (both CNN and Faux news) is a bigger problem than electing a lousy president.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- gwbas1c 9y ago
  I'm disappointed that the above comment got so many downvotes. It's an important observation in the bigger context. I used to get most of my news from CNN, and the amount of "bad" anti-trump editorials they publish really scared me. CNN has a lot of anti-Trump articles that take a trolling tone. We (me and CNN) didn't vote for Trump, and we (me and CNN) don't like him, but that's no excuse for bad journalism. Part of a democracy is getting along when you loose the election.
thaumaturgy 9y ago
Oh, it's more overt than that. Ajit Pai has been rolling back FCC regulations preventing Sinclair from massively expanding its media empire. In exchange, with Pai acting as a go-between for Trump and Sinclair, Sinclair promised Trump that he'd get better media coverage. [1] Reddit had a large thread about this video over the weekend. Most of the comments were the usual garbage, but there was some good stuff in there: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/88ll08/this_is_what_happens_when_one_company_owns_dozens/dwllval/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/88ll08/this_is_what... [1]: https://gist.github.com/shakna-israel/a5df6c9c70ccfce3ad3c27139cac977a https://gist.github.com/shakna-israel/a5df6c9c70ccfce3ad3c27...
- 0wnt_U_B 9y ago
  “good stuff”, you mean like yer mom?
ataturk 9y ago
It's not just local stations, though. Read about how the NY Times encourage the Spanish American War, and how they abetted crimes in Puerto Rico over the Rum trade. It's eye-popping how long the corruption has been with us.
wang_li 9y ago
>Does anyone from either side of the aisle consider a national corporation owning local stations and forcing scripts down their throat a good thing for the marketplace of ideas? Is this like there being only 1 Facebook, 1 Google, and 1 Twitter, all of which have recently begun to "fact check" the content users put on their services? I think it's important to have a broad dissemination of information about these kinds of things, but if all that is happening here is a targeted freakout because John Oliver did a story, then no thanks.
koheripbal 9y ago
The only reason this is getting so much press is because it was favorable to Trump. If we look at left leaning abuses of "news", it gets buried in downvotes and derided as "both sides". If you really want to combat the problem, you need to attack the root of the problem - for-profit 'news' organizations. There should be regulations around ownership and foreign funding of anything that labels itself "news" or "journalism".
- fncypants 9y ago
  No for-profit news organizations? That don't take money in exchange for delivering consumers eyeballs to advertisers I presume? I hope then that you subscribe to your public broadcasting stations (read: fund PBS and NPR news reporting--are you OK with that?) and have told your representatives to fund those organizations. If not, then you're looking for something that cannot be achieved and will forever be moving the goalposts. Media in the US or anywhere else, even when it is best, has never been un-biased. But it has been more honest and fair.

meri_dian 9y ago

How is that any different from major news organizations like CNN with a national reach clearly pushing biased anti-Trump news constantly? It's funny: Trump attacks CNN for being fake, biased news, then CNN responds by focusing all of their negative reporting on Trump, becoming exactly what Trump says they are. People would have had much more respect for CNN if they had stuck to the middle path in the face of Trump's insults. We should not turn a blind eye towards some instances of bias in media simply because they reinforce our own values and beliefs.

nitrogen 9y ago
Instead of derailing with "you too", can we focus on one thing at a time? National news programs are a separate issue from secretly biased local news.
- meri_dian 9y ago
  CNN doesn't stand up and say "we're devoting our reporting resources to all things anti Trump, this is our bias, it's not secret". They simply report the news they choose to report. Just like Sinclair. People watch the news hoping to get an accurate depiction of reality. When only one side of a multifaceted situation is reported on, the depiction becomes distorted. It's never OK to do this, regardless of whose side you're on.
  - ModernMech 9y ago
    All news is based. Anyone telling you otherwise (that they are fair and balanced and unbiased) is lying to you. I don't need CNN to explicitly tell me their biases, because they are not my only source of news. It's not CNN's job to make sure i get unbiased news. It my job to make sense of biased news and weave it into a consistent mental model of the world. This let's me do things like watch CNN and Fox News and recognize when they're not telling me the full story. That's the only way to fight this kind of thing.
    - mnemonicsloth 9y ago
      If all news is biased, then what Sinclair is doing should be no big deal. They have a message they're pushing, just like everybody else. Do you believe that? And if everybody has a bias, it also shouldn't be a big deal for me to ask you: What's yours?
      - ModernMech 9y ago
        It's one thing to put your message out there without having to constantly inform everyone you're biased, as CNN does. It's quite another to put your message out there and insist that everyone else is biased and therefore unfair and untrustworthy. This is what Fox News and Sinclair are doing. They don't want you to watch anything else, because it gives away the con. > What's yours? That's the thing about bias: It's multifaceted, and often subconscious. I could list some biases I'm suspicious I have, but this list would be incomplete and inaccurate.
      - jimbokun 9y ago
        If they had to put a disclaimer in front of every local news anchor saying "the following content was produced by Sinclair Corporation in collaboration with President Trump", there would not be a problem. Just like we do with other kinds of political advertisements. The problem is not the bias. The problem is the deception about who is responsible for the content. And yes, this falls into the same category as government employees in St. Petersburg masquerading as US citizens while publishing political propaganda.
- wanderer2323 9y ago
  That's not derailing, you are trying to split hairs to stifle discussion. Global media is pretty clearly biased against the current administration. It seems that Sinclair is the asymmetrical response. Discussing them in the larger context of the US news is completely valid.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    It's hilarious. Just like Facebook privacy issues only blew up when it might have benefited Trump, but it was fine when Obama used that data (on a much larger scale), it's funny that NYT is suddenly paying attention to this coordinated reporting campaign when they and the national TV media parrot Media Matters all day, every day. It's easy to find a dozen examples of national TV talking heads all using the same phrases and vocabulary to report on some pro-left or anti-right issue.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - larkost 9y ago
      The data that the Obama campaign used, and the one that the Trump campaign may have used (it is clear they had it, unclear that they used it) were very different both in collection and in scope. The Obama campaign asked supporters which of their FaceBook contacts they thought were likely to be receptive to messages from the team, and only collected the FaceBook handles. The information shared with the Trump campaign was collected (not by the Trump campaign) was far more reaching than just the FaceBook name, including a lot of personal information both about the people who installed the "personality test" app, and the personal information of all of their FaceBook "friends". Trying to equate these two is just not honest. Separately I would expect the same phrasing and vocabulary to emerge in the media. They are all talking to the same general pool of sources, and listening to each other. What I do not expect (and smacks of authoritarianism) is for them to all be reading from the exact same script.
dguaraglia 9y ago
Well, for one: CNN isn't getting a sweet new FCC head honcho to shape policy to benefit them. Second: do you understand the difference between a free press and a propaganda machine, right? One goes against the government's views, the other one pushes it.
- meri_dian 9y ago
  "One goes against the government's views, the other one pushes it." No, that's not it. A free press is "free" because it's unconstrained by a Government or capricious regulation, not because it "goes against the government's views". Sometimes members of a free press will support the government, other times they won't. It's not a priori virtuous to go against the Government's views. Sometimes the Government is right and sometimes it's not. Like everyone else.
  - dguaraglia 9y ago
    I'd agree with you, except for this: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/trump-campaign-sinclair-broadcasting-jared-kushner-232764 https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/trump-campaign-sincla...
  - digitaltrees 9y ago
    Your definition of free press ignores the impact of government involvement in the press and preferential treatment it confers on specific organizations. Where the government favors one media/press organization and gives preferential treatment, every non-preferred media outlet is less free because they are constrained in ways the preferred outlet is not. You're right it's not inherently virtuous to go against the Government's views. But it is inherently bad to push government views in exchange for preferential treatment which is what appears to be happening here and with the National Enquirer. If you are concerned about a free press, you should be equally concerned about the commingling of government and press such that the government captures certain media properties and converts them to state run media. Free press means a separation of government and press; any governmental involvement damages a free press.
  - fmihaila 9y ago
pasbesoin 9y ago
CNN is a network. It is not station ownership. Stations have obligations in return for their licensing. Some of which require them to serve the public good. Local newscasting falls in that category. Sinclair is turning that "public good" into propaganda. This is counter to the license terms. At least, in my opinion. Maybe we'll see that addressed, in court, at some point. There are also marketshare caps, created to prevent this kind of bias from gaining dominance of the broadcast market. Sinclair has been lobbying and buying its way towards circumvention of those caps. Numerous studies indicate that, with all the changes in media, many people still go to their local broadcast news station for their news, and that they have a higher level of trust in it than in other sources. Arguably, when you turn on CNN or Fox -- networks, that cable and satellite providers can choose to carry along with however many other channels they want to sell you -- you know what you're getting. This, by contrast, is a creeping menace of bias, masked as your trusted local news source. (And as other "public service" broadcasting. Whereas people reasonably argue that the demonstrated bias to one political agenda, as well as the masking of the source of said programming, is not "public service".)
mcphage 9y ago
> It's funny: Trump attacks CNN for being fake, biased news, then CNN responds by focusing all of their negative reporting on Trump, becoming exactly what Trump says they are. CNN reporting negatively on Trump doesn't make them "fake". He's a bad president and a bad leader; reporting on that means you're telling the truth. Fake mean lying, not reporting truth you don't want to hear.
- gwbas1c 9y ago
  Have you read their editorials? They're so biased and poorly written that I can no longer regard CNN as a good news source. It's a case of "two wrongs don't make a right." Lowering reporting standards because the other side lowered reporting standards means we have no good news. Not being able to trust the media (both CNN and Faux news) is a bigger problem than electing a lousy president.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
gwbas1c 9y ago
I'm disappointed that the above comment got so many downvotes. It's an important observation in the bigger context. I used to get most of my news from CNN, and the amount of "bad" anti-trump editorials they publish really scared me. CNN has a lot of anti-Trump articles that take a trolling tone. We (me and CNN) didn't vote for Trump, and we (me and CNN) don't like him, but that's no excuse for bad journalism. Part of a democracy is getting along when you loose the election.

thaumaturgy 9y ago

Oh, it's more overt than that. Ajit Pai has been rolling back FCC regulations preventing Sinclair from massively expanding its media empire. In exchange, with Pai acting as a go-between for Trump and Sinclair, Sinclair promised Trump that he'd get better media coverage. [1] Reddit had a large thread about this video over the weekend. Most of the comments were the usual garbage, but there was some good stuff in there: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/88ll08/this_is_what_happens_when_one_company_owns_dozens/dwllval/ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/88ll08/this_is_what... [1]: https://gist.github.com/shakna-israel/a5df6c9c70ccfce3ad3c27139cac977a https://gist.github.com/shakna-israel/a5df6c9c70ccfce3ad3c27...

0wnt_U_B 9y ago
“good stuff”, you mean like yer mom?

ataturk 9y ago

It's not just local stations, though. Read about how the NY Times encourage the Spanish American War, and how they abetted crimes in Puerto Rico over the Rum trade. It's eye-popping how long the corruption has been with us.

wang_li 9y ago

>Does anyone from either side of the aisle consider a national corporation owning local stations and forcing scripts down their throat a good thing for the marketplace of ideas? Is this like there being only 1 Facebook, 1 Google, and 1 Twitter, all of which have recently begun to "fact check" the content users put on their services? I think it's important to have a broad dissemination of information about these kinds of things, but if all that is happening here is a targeted freakout because John Oliver did a story, then no thanks.

koheripbal 9y ago

The only reason this is getting so much press is because it was favorable to Trump. If we look at left leaning abuses of "news", it gets buried in downvotes and derided as "both sides". If you really want to combat the problem, you need to attack the root of the problem - for-profit 'news' organizations. There should be regulations around ownership and foreign funding of anything that labels itself "news" or "journalism".

fncypants 9y ago
No for-profit news organizations? That don't take money in exchange for delivering consumers eyeballs to advertisers I presume? I hope then that you subscribe to your public broadcasting stations (read: fund PBS and NPR news reporting--are you OK with that?) and have told your representatives to fund those organizations. If not, then you're looking for something that cannot be achieved and will forever be moving the goalposts. Media in the US or anywhere else, even when it is best, has never been un-biased. But it has been more honest and fair.