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You are insulting the wrong people. Please do not blame the victims for choosing not to walk willingly into homelessness and financial ruin. Blame those that

You are insulting the wrong people. Please do not blame the victims for choosing not to walk willingly into homelessness and financial ruin. Blame those that allow such gross power imbalances to occur.

anigbrowl 9y ago
How are we to know who they are when they have effective control of the media? homelessness and financial ruin News anchors in the Bay Area are paid about $4-500k. They may be operating under onerous contracts with clawbacks, but they could budget strategically or fight those contracts in court to expose how bad they are, either personally or via their union. Very few people have that kind of financial room to maneuver or the public following that would bring a sympathetic audience for a legal battle.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  SF is not a typical market. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/reporters-correspondents-and-broadcast-news-analysts.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/reporters-co... Median pay for on-screen television news talent is less than $40k/year. That encompasses everyone, not just the anchors (aka "broadcast news analysts"), but the number for them is about $57k/year. The typical career progression is for people to move to larger cities, with larger and richer media markets, to earn higher pay. The majority of Sinclair-owned stations are not in San Francisco. But you are otherwise correct, the union hasn't been earning its dues here, and the highly-paid anchors haven't assumed leadership roles against the Sinclair contracts, either. Most individual anchors are not in a position of power with respect to their own employers. They may have a position of power over other people's employers, but they emphatically cannot run a critical piece on their own bosses and expect to keep sitting behind that broadcast desk, or any other. Acting as anonymous source for a print news journalist (working for a different media conglomerate) is probably the best they can do.
verylittlemeat 9y ago
You're right that a power imbalance caused this but that doesn't let the news anchors off the hook. These anchors know what their talents are. They are trained to speak with confidence and to appear as an information authority to their communities. This isn't some cog in the machine tweaking a spreadsheet in an office building that leads to some guy losing a job 1,000 miles away. These anchors are allowing their faces and their voices and the direct trust vested in their personalities to be abused for propaganda. These anchors should be pushing back because when the shoe drops (like it is now) they will be taking the heat for being paid stooges. They will be disgraced in their community and just replaced by someone else willing to read whatever they're told until it happens again.

anigbrowl 9y ago

How are we to know who they are when they have effective control of the media? homelessness and financial ruin News anchors in the Bay Area are paid about $4-500k. They may be operating under onerous contracts with clawbacks, but they could budget strategically or fight those contracts in court to expose how bad they are, either personally or via their union. Very few people have that kind of financial room to maneuver or the public following that would bring a sympathetic audience for a legal battle.

logfromblammo 9y ago
SF is not a typical market. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/reporters-correspondents-and-broadcast-news-analysts.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/reporters-co... Median pay for on-screen television news talent is less than $40k/year. That encompasses everyone, not just the anchors (aka "broadcast news analysts"), but the number for them is about $57k/year. The typical career progression is for people to move to larger cities, with larger and richer media markets, to earn higher pay. The majority of Sinclair-owned stations are not in San Francisco. But you are otherwise correct, the union hasn't been earning its dues here, and the highly-paid anchors haven't assumed leadership roles against the Sinclair contracts, either. Most individual anchors are not in a position of power with respect to their own employers. They may have a position of power over other people's employers, but they emphatically cannot run a critical piece on their own bosses and expect to keep sitting behind that broadcast desk, or any other. Acting as anonymous source for a print news journalist (working for a different media conglomerate) is probably the best they can do.

verylittlemeat 9y ago

You're right that a power imbalance caused this but that doesn't let the news anchors off the hook. These anchors know what their talents are. They are trained to speak with confidence and to appear as an information authority to their communities. This isn't some cog in the machine tweaking a spreadsheet in an office building that leads to some guy losing a job 1,000 miles away. These anchors are allowing their faces and their voices and the direct trust vested in their personalities to be abused for propaganda. These anchors should be pushing back because when the shoe drops (like it is now) they will be taking the heat for being paid stooges. They will be disgraced in their community and just replaced by someone else willing to read whatever they're told until it happens again.