If Sinclair doesn’t kill off local news, incompetent reporting will

Two things happened today that left me shaking my head. They may seem unrelated at first, but I’m going to tie them both together, so please read on.

First, I saw a video clip concerning the Sinclair Broadcast Group – a well-known propaganda outlet for the extreme right – which showed dozens of local news anchors across the country reading a prepared script criticizing social media and mainstream reporters for biased or fake news reporting. The script said, in part:

“The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. Some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”

The irony, of course, is that Sinclair is using its own biased platform to push its pro-Trump agenda by accusing the “other” media of doing exactly what Sinclair does. It’s “pot meets kettle” on steroids.

It reminds me of a comment that former TV host Billy Bush recently made to Bill Maher on “Real Time.” After confronting Donald Trump for lying about his ratings on “The Apprentice,” Bush said Trump continued to push the false information, telling Bush, “Billy, look…you just tell them, and they believe it.” So using Trump logic, if Sinclair broadcasters say NBC is a threat to democracy, it must therefore be true.  

A little history about Sinclair from Wikipedia:

Sinclair Broadcast Group is owned by the family of company founder Julian Sinclair Smith. Headquartered in Hunt Valley, Maryland, the company is the largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations, and largest by total coverage, owning or operating a total of 193 stations in more than 100 markets across the country. That number will increase to 233 after all currently proposed sales are approved, and it’s estimated that soon, Sinclair will reach 72% of all American households in markets as large as Washington, D.C., and as small as Steubenville, Ohio.

Many stations are owned outright by the company, but others are affiliated with other companies through a local marketing agreement, a concept Sinclair pioneered in Pittsburgh in 1991. The stations involved in the initial deal, WPGH-TV and WPTT (now WPNT) are now both owned by Sinclair outright.

So getting back to the propaganda, Sinclair not only required its news anchors to read a prepared script charging a proliferation of "fake news" in the media, but it also suggested that attacking faux-president Trump's view of events was "extremely dangerous to our democracy." A video mash-up of dozens of news reporters reading the script word-for-word made the rounds on social media, network television and even “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver, and was resoundingly criticized by both champions and practitioners of responsible journalism.

This wave of mockery from honest, respectable journalists apparently got under the thin skin of our Tweeter-in-Chief, who this morning wrote:   

“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.”

Also this morning, my local newspaper ran a story about an alleged arson fire which followed a May 2017 break-in at a Fairmont residence. The story was so full of holes it was impossible to determine exactly what was stolen or whether the house actually burned down or what became of the owner or why it took 11 months to bring the charges against a woman and her former boyfriend who were arrested for the crime.

One of the items listed as stolen in the break-in was “a Gibson Fender stratocaster electric guitar” (I’ll let you figure that one out) which, the story said, was subsequently buried in the back yard of a neighboring house to hide evidence of the theft but was found by police in a closet in the alleged thief’s house, and a handgun which had been sold to a third party some time ago. How did all of this happen? Who the hell knows?

This isn’t the first time a local news story has raised more questions than it answered. In fact, that’s the rule rather than the exception in this area, and that’s my point in including it in a story about Sinclair media. Added together, the growing number of propaganda outlets and the basic incompetence of small-town news reporters leads me to the conclusion that if local news isn’t on the verge of death, it is at least severely wounded.

If the want ads soliciting “multi-media specialists” are to be believed, today’s “reporters” are hired based on two critical skills – the ability to shoot video with a cell phone camera and to post those clips to a web site. I don’t think that critical thinking, basic curiosity or the ability to do research, ask questions and write news stories are even considered by small town media.    

So where does that leave us? It seems we have two choices: We can get part of the story from a new wave of pseudo-journalists who lack basic reporting skills (we'll just have to guess the rest), or we can be brainwashed by a right-wing media conglomerate that gives the Russian Tass News Agency a run for its money.

Or there’s a third option, I guess. We can just ignore local news altogether and depend on Facebook and Twitter to tell us what’s going on in the world. (And yes, I hated myself for even typing those words the second they appeared on my screen.)