Live data from Hacker News

Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script

nytimes.com

241–250 of 344 posts

Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script

#241

Trump recently took DACA off the negotiating table, announcing it in a tweet, citing a Fox News & Friends segment on 'caravans' of inbound immigrants: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration/trump-say... The President is watching this same garbage and making policy decisions based on it. Let that sink in for a moment.

What are my best and quickest options to legally expatriate out of the US?

Germany or Canada.

Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script

#242

Nothing new. I worked in a newsroom as an intern and most major news stations rely (maybe, relied, it's been a few years) on a tool like ENPS. It's made by the Associated Press and has a "wire" feature where new stories come into. So, e.g., if there was a plane crash, that message would be pushed out to all newsrooms that rely on ENPS. The news producers were lazy, too. They'd literally take the script that ENPS push…

Where do you suggest people go to get their news instead ?

National/international news from AP and Reuters is about as politically neutral as you can get. Major news networks, even overtly partisan ones like FOX News, rarely outright lie - their bias is in sins of omission. You can watch ABC, CNN, FOX, or read the NY Times or Washington Post, and take it with a grain of salt if it starts feeling one-sided.

The internet is a wonderful thing.

But the heart of the bias problem isn't that the sources are biased, at least if you stay away from outright nonsense like InfoWars. Rather, the problem is that people are biased, and then start looking for news that reinforces our biases. We can even read the same story and get entirely different interpretations of it (see all the arguing downthread about DACA negotiations).

Facts are (mostly) objective; interpretation is always subjective.

Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script

#243

Those news anchors were either OK with the contents of the script they were ordered to read, or they were gutless cowards for not resigning or allowing themselves to be fired.

You are insulting the wrong people. Please do not blame the victims for choosing not to walk willingly into homelessness and financial ruin. Blame those that allow such gross power imbalances to occur.

Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They wanted tens of billions of dollars for a symbolic wall In fact the wall would have been physical, rather than 'symbolic'

I believe symbolic here means that it won't actually function to deter illegal immigration, at least not proportionally to spending that money on other efforts.

Is Israel's border wall symbolic or physical?

Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you suggest people go to get their news instead ?

One must try to find points of view from all "sides", and then apply critical thinking to everything that one reads/hears. Every source is very biased and full of a lot of (mostly, really) shit, but the facts can be discerned if personal biases give way to objective analysis.

That's the logical failing of the moderate - to reduce everything to opinion and bias, and ignore the existence of fact.

If one side says 2+2=4, and the other side said 2+2=6, the truth is not that 2+2=5 and everyone needs to stop being so partisan.

Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script

#246

It seems like the issue is a lack of competition, if I don't like what Sinclair is saying I can not watch it, but if they own all the stations then I don't have that choice. The FCC did all this while everyone was distracted with net neutrality, so even if it came up again there the FCC knows how to distract people already. I'm just not sure what I as a viewer/voter can do about except wait for the next election, and…

>or if the merger with Tribune Media goes through? That's the whole reason this is a story. The viral clip was assembled by far-left think tank ThinkProgress to attempt to torpedo the merger by stirring up public outcry. And of course, the mainstream media, who indirectly compete against these local stations, is happy to support these efforts.

I mean, if that's the case then they're not wrong. No single company should own all local media, ever.

Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script

#247

Last Week Tonight (John Oliver) dove into this last year. It's really frustrating that they can leverage so much political sway under the cover of "news reporting". Then forcing news stations to broadcast this garbage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc

"👎" to the John Oliver reference. His "reporting" is as biased as it gets. His show is written in a style that convinces the subconscious to accept presented arguments without engaging any serious logical scrutiny. Just try to remember if at any point during any of his broadcasts you actually analyzed the subject of his monologues, rather than simply furthering the thought-process that he was laying out for y…

John Oliver hosts a late night talk show and he is primarily a comedian. He is not a journalist so your commentary on journalism seems misplaced on this point.

Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, just about as scary as GE, Disney, Time Warner et al. pushing their left wing agendas via CNN, MSNBC/NBC and ABC. See, everyone can play this game in the Postmodernist world.

Ignoring the fact that there are far more than left/right in the real world, I take issue with the equivalency you're making between Right and Left in the USA. While both sides have many pet issues and wedge issues that are divisive and bad for democracy, the right is denying scientific truth and actively contradicting its extreme budget-hawkishness under the previous president. While the left is bought quite a bit,…

It's extraordinarily worrying to me that the American Left uses 'science' as a shield for its ideological positions and the adherents of its ideology lap it up and repeat it.

I don't care so much about the ideological positions. What I care about is the constant, systemic undermining of science.

Take your comment, for instance. You throw about the notion of 'scientific truth', as if this is even a thing. Science does not deal in truth. Truth is for the priests and the philosophers. This 'Temple of Science' American Leftists have attempted to create, where all beliefs of the American Left (like climate change, organic food, socialism, tabula rasa, and Boasian anthropology) are enshrined as 'Science', unassailable to criticism (criticizing them means you are 'not educated' or 'don't understand science') regardless the flimsiness of the papers published to support those positions, makes science a partisan field.

The American Right has been trained to hate and distrust science. They hate it. They think scientists are all frauds. Why? Because 'scientists', they are told, again and again, support all these Leftist ideological bents that are not science, and that those on the Right know, at some level, are not science.

Anthropogenic global warming, as an example, is utter nonsense. Without NOAA, NASA, and GHCN doing heavy manipulation of the raw data before the thousands of scientists who work on it ever see that data, you don't have climate change.[1] Without concealing historical sea ice data, these agencies don't have anything abnormal to report on that front.[2]

Right now, you have a situation in America where a bunch of zealots have claimed science as their own, to push their decidedly non-scientific, partisan ideologies... and the other bunch of zealots on the other side of the aisle have disclaimed science as full of shills and charlatans hoaxing the public for tax dollars.

I don't know if you actually care about science. I suspect you don't - otherwise you wouldn't be using 'scientific truth' (no such thing) as a shield for your ideology.

But I do, and frankly, when I see one side of the most powerful nation on Earth using science as its meat shield and the other side concomitantly coming to view science with hostility and suspicion, when science used to be an apolitical source of wonderment for people from all ideological backgrounds in that same country half a century ago, I am deeply afraid for the future of real scientific investigation.

[1] https://realclimatescience.com/100-of-us-warming-is-due-to-n...

[2] https://realclimatescience.com/government-arctic-sea-ice-fra...

Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script

#249

Last Week Tonight (John Oliver) dove into this last year. It's really frustrating that they can leverage so much political sway under the cover of "news reporting". Then forcing news stations to broadcast this garbage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc

"👎" to the John Oliver reference. His "reporting" is as biased as it gets. His show is written in a style that convinces the subconscious to accept presented arguments without engaging any serious logical scrutiny. Just try to remember if at any point during any of his broadcasts you actually analyzed the subject of his monologues, rather than simply furthering the thought-process that he was laying out for y…

Can you refute the claims in the video posted? The style is unrelated to the validity of the claims.

Re: Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script

#250

Those news anchors were either OK with the contents of the script they were ordered to read, or they were gutless cowards for not resigning or allowing themselves to be fired.

The journalism job market ain't what it used to be. I find it hard to label people trying to keep their family fed and housed as "gutless cowards."

That's true, but getting paid a lot so that the personal sacrifices would be that much greater isn't greater moral ill for the news anchors. They could go and get regular jobs (ie at median pay when starting a different career, but are over-leveraged, basically. That's a tough spot to be in, but it doesn't make it OK to participate in further debasement of the system.
Post reply on HN