Sinclair Broadcasting should be broken up, not allowed to become even bigger

This past week­end, the fine folks over at ThinkProgress and Dead­spin did Amer­i­cans a great ser­vice when they each post­ed fright­en­ing videos show­ing anchors of a pletho­ra of Sin­clair-owned tele­vi­sion sta­tions across the coun­try read­ing off the same Trumpian script on orders from their cor­po­rate over­lords in Hunt Val­ley, Mary­land, where Sin­clair is headquartered.

The videos have become a sen­sa­tion and have been viewed by mil­lions, draw­ing reac­tions from many elect­ed offi­cials and celebrities.

“News anchors look­ing into cam­era and read­ing a script hand­ed down by a cor­po­rate over­lord, words meant to obscure the truth not elu­ci­date it, isn’t jour­nal­ism. It’s pro­pa­gan­da. It’s Orwellian,” tweet­ed Dan Rather. “A slip­pery slope to how despots wrest pow­er, silence dis­sent, and oppress the masses.”

“This is extreme­ly dan­ger­ous to our democ­ra­cy,” agreed Jim­my Kim­mel, whose show airs in late night on many of Sin­clair’s stations.

Rarely have we seen a pair of videos that so pow­er­ful­ly demon­strate the ter­ri­ble harm that comes from unchecked media con­sol­i­da­tion and con­cen­tra­tion in our coun­try, a high­ly destruc­tive trend that has been con­tin­u­ing unabat­ed for years, result­ing in few­er jour­nal­ists, few­er news­rooms, and few­er local owners.

Sin­clair — which HBO host John Oliv­er calls the largest media con­glom­er­ate you’ve nev­er heard of — owns dozens upon dozens of local tele­vi­sion sta­tions across the coun­try, includ­ing sev­er­al in the Pacif­ic North­west it acquired when it bought up Fish­er Broad­cast­ing in 2013. NPI opposed Fish­er’s sale to Sin­clair, but regret­tably, the acqui­si­tion was approved by the Oba­ma administration.

Fish­er is thus no more, and its sta­tions, Seat­tle’s KOMO and Port­land’s KATU among them, are now cogs in Sin­clair’s machine. Not only are they forced to car­ry the right wing pro­pa­gan­da pro­duced out of Sin­clair HQ, man­age­ment occa­sion­al­ly tries to skew their news cov­er­age. The Seat­tle Times’ Mike Rosen­berg explains:

KOMO jour­nal­ists say it is rare for Sin­clair to give them sto­ry assignments.

But they occa­sion­al­ly hap­pen. Two KOMO jour­nal­ists recalled a Seat­tle Times edi­to­r­i­al that railed against the Sin­clair pur­chase of KOMO in 2013. Sin­clair then imme­di­ate­ly told KOMO to run a “smear” piece on the Times, the KOMO staffers said. (The sto­ry as envi­sioned nev­er ran; staffers say they refused to do it, but KOMO did run a piece on the decline of news­pa­pers around that time).

Anoth­er for­mer KOMO staffer recalled sub­mit­ting a sto­ry about a Seat­tle City Coun­cil vote over a non-essen­tial project requir­ing tax­pay­er funds. They inter­viewed sev­er­al peo­ple dur­ing “man on the street” report­ing and found no one was against the funds being used.

But the KOMO direc­tor in charge said Sin­clair had encour­aged reporters to find oppo­si­tion when cov­er­ing those types of sto­ries, to pump up the idea of tax­pay­er waste.

The KOMO direc­tor said, “Cor­po­rate is watch­ing, and they need this angle,” a for­mer KOMO staffer who worked on the sto­ry said. “And I wouldn’t do it. It’s com­plete­ly plant­i­ng the news.”

The worst, some KOMO staffers fear, is yet to come. One told Rosenberg:

“We have midterms com­ing up,” a jour­nal­ist there said, refer­ring to the Novem­ber elec­tions. “Who’s to say what’s going to come from (Sin­clair) when that rolls around. This is not going to be the last effort by cor­po­rate to try to dis­sem­i­nate their message.”

https://thinkprogress.org/sinclair-forces-reporters-to-read-script-about-fake-news-63ae6fcea30e/

Amer­i­ca’s air­waves are part of its com­mons and belong to the pub­lic, but you would­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly know that by look­ing at the media land­scape we have.

Sin­clair has been allowed by the our gov­ern­ment to con­trol way too much of our pub­lic air­waves. And right now, Sin­clair is try­ing to get even big­ger. It wants to buy out Tri­bune and add a choice group of tele­vi­sion sta­tions to its portfolio.

That planned acqui­si­tion should be blocked (as should AT&T’s pro­posed deal for Time Warn­er), and Sin­clair should be bro­ken up as part of a trust­bust­ing cam­paign to diver­si­fy our coun­try’s media own­er­ship along with Dis­ney, Com­cast (which owns NBCU­ni­ver­sal), CBS, Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry Fox, and oth­er large media conglomerates.

It must be not­ed that unchecked media con­sol­i­da­tion isn’t just bad for tra­di­tion­al forms of media like news­pa­pers, tele­vi­sion, and radio. Big media is also a seri­ous threat to Inter­net free­dom. The big­ger big media gets, the more influ­ence it has, and the more con­cen­trat­ed own­er­ship of dig­i­tal prop­er­ties get.

The Inter­net is not immune to the harms caused by media con­cen­tra­tion, and it will not save us from a future in which pro­gram­ming and edi­to­r­i­al deci­sions are dic­tat­ed by a small num­ber of wealthy, pow­er­ful peo­ple who are pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned about their cor­po­rate bot­tom lines as opposed to the well-being of the country.

That is why action must be tak­en to break up com­pa­nies like Sin­clair. Amer­i­ca needs a twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry update of its antitrust laws to get the ball rolling, and that should be one of the first orders of busi­ness under a new­ly-elect­ed Demo­c­ra­t­ic Con­gress, should vot­ers choose to fire the Repub­li­cans this autumn.