Vox: Sinclair, the pro-Trump, conservative company taking over local news, explained
Sinclair reaches 40 percent of households — and soon will reach 72 percent.
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.
How America's largest local TV owner turned its news anchors into soldiers in Trump's war on the media:
https://t.co/iLVtKRQycL pic.twitter.com/dMdSGellH3
— Deadspin (@Deadspin) March 31, 2018
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:
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.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2018
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.
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https://www.vox.com/2018/4/3/17180020/s ... -affiliate