Oh? What's this? A viral video about a media monopoly? Well this is something you don't see every day.
Please watch this video. It's... a little scary. Though, in case you don't have the time or means to watch it, here's a quick summary:
The video shows a collection of local news stations running the same story. Dozens of anchors are reading from the same script. What's the story about? Fake news. The Trump kind. And, to top it all off, the script ends with the wonderfully ironic line, "This is extremely dangerous to our democracy."
(As a side note, kudos to whoever edited this. It's amazingly well done.)
So who's behind these scripted segments? Just how common are they? And what kinds of dangers do they pose?
Let's start with the who. All of the local stations shown in the video are owned by a company called Sinclair Broadcast Group. Founded in 1986 by Julian Sinclair Smith and his sons, the company has since grown into one of the country's largest media conglomerates. As per its website, it owns "193 television stations and 614 channels in 89 US markets." The Washington Post reports that among those stations are "59 Fox affiliates, 41 ABC affiliates, 30 CBS affiliates, 25 NBC affiliates, nine Univision affiliates and others." Just to give you a sense of scale, that's enough stations to reach almost 40% of all households in America.
And what does Sinclair do with all of those stations? Well, you just watched it in the video above. According to NPR, every single one of Sinclair's 193 stations had to have a news anchor recite that script about "false news."
Okay, so let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Who knows, maybe they just really care about quality reporting. Unfortunately, that theory lasts as long as a cursory Google search. Among Sinclair's "must-air" segments are a show called Bottom Line hosted by Trump campaign surrogate Boris Epshteyn, a speech by the company's vice president accusing the national media of being "fake news," and, most egregiously, a daily "Terrorism Alert Desk." That last one frequently runs poorly sourced stories, and it is exclusively focused on radical Islamic terrorism. It's hard to find raw clips on YouTube, but a recent Last Week Tonight included some of the more absurd stories: link here.
So, okay, okay, they run some pretty conservative, and sometimes outright false, segments. That doesn't prove that they have a purely conservative bent. What does prove it is that, according to the Washington Post, "all of Sinclair’s nationally-syndicated commentators espouse a conservative perspective on the news." Epshteyn was already mentioned. The others are: Mark Hyman, a company executive and frequent contributor to conservative magazines; Sharyl Attkinson, an investigative reporter who recently published a book calling reports on Russian hackers and Donald Trump's racism and misogyny "fake news;" and Armstrong Williams, who claims to be "one of the most recognizable conservative voices in America."
By now it should be pretty clear that Sinclair and its must-air segments are conservative and, more than that, Trumpian. Why does this matter? After all, companies are allowed to be conservative. Well, it matters for two reasons: journalistic integrity and regulatory capture.
The first reason should be pretty clear: Sinclair controls enough of the local news market that airing biased, poorly sourced, or downright false segments can significantly affect the public's view. This effect is twofold: the section of the public that believes Sinclair becomes less informed, while the section that does not believe it loses trust in the news media as a whole. And, as Sinclair is so eager to remind us, having a misinformed, untrusting public is "extremely dangerous to our democracy."
The second reason requires a little bit of explanation and a little bit of backstory. To start off, I'll go over what regulatory capture is, and how it applies in this situation.
Regulatory capture occurs when a private company or group of companies gain control of the government body that is tasked with regulating those companies. For example, when the EPA first investigated fracking in the early 2000s, its report claimed that the process had no adverse effects on the surrounding drinking water. This was, of course, untrue, and it was revealed that a number of the employees responsible for the report had clear conflicts of interest. In other words, members of the natural gas industry "captured" those employees.
And now, the backstory for Sinclair. Remember how I said that Sinclair broadcasts to about 40% of American households? Well, in May of last year, Sinclair announced that it planned to buy Tribune Media in a massive merger that would increase its reach from 40% to 70% of households.
"But wait!" you say, "That's practically a monopoly on local news! Those are illegal!" And you would be right - or rather, you would have been right, up until just a few weeks before the deal was announced. That was when the FCC, with Ajit Pai at its helm, changed the rules regarding TV station ownership to allow for a deal like Sinclair's. The New York Times covers the whole story, as well as the investigation into potential regulatory capture, here.
But what is Ajit Pai getting out of this? And for that matter, why is Trump so supportive of the company? Well, they get a Trumpian voice on the news in the majority of households in America. Increased public support for conservative positions like the repeal of net neutrality. In a word, propaganda. That may sound a bit extreme, but if this deal goes through, Sinclair will pretty much tick all the boxes: it'll be a pervasive and largely unnoticed distributor of often outright false information, intentionally allying itself with the executive branch, and able to broadcast into the majority of homes in the country with the express permission of said executive branch.
Once more, all together now: this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
