"Morning Joe" covered this today with clips of local Sinclair owned station anchors reading the exact same script about the Wall Street Journal article about President Biden's age and saying that his so-called cognitive deficits could possibly decide the election. They said the same words and then they cut to the same national reporter spouting anti-Biden lies.
Sincliair is the second-largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations (after Nexstar Media Group), owning or operating a total of 193 stations across the country in over 100 markets (covering 40% of American households), and is the largest owner of stations affiliated with Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, MyNetworkTV, and The CW. (Wikipedia)
Here's an article about this with a six minute video of examples.
Excerpt:
Local television news broadcasters are airing suspiciously similar attacks on Joe Biden’s mental acuity and how it will affect the coming election—and it appears to be part of a coordinated effort.
The Sinclair Broadcast Group owns or operates 185 local television stations across the country, and dozens of their stations aired a segment from national correspondent Matthew Galka citing a Wall Street Journal articlethat makes dubious attacks on Biden’s age and mental awareness. The stations that aired the segment introduced it using startlingly similar, if not identical language, the Popular Information and Public Notice newsletters reported.
Here's a different video on the same subject.
This is from the Wikipedia entry on Sinclair:
A 2019 study in the American Political Science Review found that "stations bought by Sinclair reduce coverage of local politics, increase national coverage and move the ideological tone of coverage in a conservative direction relative to other stations operating in the same market". The company has been criticized by journalists and media analysts for requiring its stations to broadcast packaged video segments and its news anchors to read prepared scripts that contain pro-Trump editorial content, including warnings about purported "fake news" in mainstream media, while Trump has tweeted support for watching Sinclair over CNN and NBC
Read more about their political views and how they are integated into their local news coverage here. Note that Sinclair often mandates its stations to air specific reports, segments, programs and editorials, referred to as "must-runs".
When people tune in to watch Fox News they know what to expect. When they tune in to a local Sinclair owned station they may not know that they will be watching segments that are as biased as those on Fox News.
I live in the Portland, Oregon suburbs and KATU is the Sinclair station here. Many people I know who are very liberal watch it for local news and weather without knowing that it is a far-right propaganda outlet.
I live where there are two other local stations, KOIN and KGW. I don't click on KATU (upper left below). The other stations have websites where I can check out local news. The local newspaper The Oregonian also has a website, Oregon Live.
The company wields a lot of influence considering it is headquartered in a five story building in a Baltimore suburb.
By comparison NBC is housed at 30 Rock (below left)and Fox News is located in the News Corp Building.
You can read my blog in either of these places:
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