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Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script

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

#161
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised Democrats didn’t compromise on that, I think they are too focused on making Trump fail at any cost. I’m all for increased immigration and amnesty, but I’m not in support of open borders, so a compromise for increased border security sounded like good policy to me.

No one is seriously proposing open boarders. Anyone on the right telling you otherwise is selling you a straw man. And let's all remember, a border without a wall is not an "open" border. That's not what that means.

I consider them open now, in practice not law.

Despite also supporting amnesty, chain migration, and increased visa quotas I’ve been told I’m racist for wanting a secure border. Racist for not supporting border policies that create an underclass of undocumented, helpless workers.

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

#162
post #12

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

I agree. 232 people control the news that 277 million americans are allowed to see. ([1] from 2012). Many of us have been pounding this drum for a long time, including Trump himself. I think it is this control at a national level that the Sinclair news anchors were being told to warn people about, but the NYT has flipped the narrative on them, and now they're the bad guys. Genius, but unfortunate. [1] http://www.busi…

It is not "are allowed to see" but "chose to consume". This whole "fake news" jazz is for the wrong reason.

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

#163

In my eyes, this is a clear set/spike play. A huge corporation, enabled by their corrupt allies in the FCC, buy up hundreds of "local" stations. They then use the local cred/reputation of these stations to suggest that fake news is rampant on other sources (not controlled by Sinclair). They then tilt the dialogue nation-wide. Meanwhile, the average citizen is unaware that their trusted local anchor is bought/sold, th…

How is that any different from major news organizations like CNN with a national reach clearly pushing biased anti-Trump news constantly? It's funny: Trump attacks CNN for being fake, biased news, then CNN responds by focusing all of their negative reporting on Trump, becoming exactly what Trump says they are. People would have had much more respect for CNN if they had stuck to the middle path in the face of Trump's…

CNN is a network. It is not station ownership.

Stations have obligations in return for their licensing. Some of which require them to serve the public good. Local newscasting falls in that category.

Sinclair is turning that "public good" into propaganda. This is counter to the license terms. At least, in my opinion. Maybe we'll see that addressed, in court, at some point.

There are also marketshare caps, created to prevent this kind of bias from gaining dominance of the broadcast market. Sinclair has been lobbying and buying its way towards circumvention of those caps.

Numerous studies indicate that, with all the changes in media, many people still go to their local broadcast news station for their news, and that they have a higher level of trust in it than in other sources.

Arguably, when you turn on CNN or Fox -- networks, that cable and satellite providers can choose to carry along with however many other channels they want to sell you -- you know what you're getting.

This, by contrast, is a creeping menace of bias, masked as your trusted local news source. (And as other "public service" broadcasting. Whereas people reasonably argue that the demonstrated bias to one political agenda, as well as the masking of the source of said programming, is not "public service".)

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All news is based. Anyone telling you otherwise (that they are fair and balanced and unbiased) is lying to you. I don't need CNN to explicitly tell me their biases, because they are not my only source of news. It's not CNN's job to make sure i get unbiased news. It my job to make sense of biased news and weave it into a consistent mental model of the world. This let's me do things like watch CNN and Fox News and reco…

If all news is biased, then what Sinclair is doing should be no big deal. They have a message they're pushing, just like everybody else. Do you believe that? And if everybody has a bias, it also shouldn't be a big deal for me to ask you: What's yours?

It's one thing to put your message out there without having to constantly inform everyone you're biased, as CNN does. It's quite another to put your message out there and insist that everyone else is biased and therefore unfair and untrustworthy. This is what Fox News and Sinclair are doing. They don't want you to watch anything else, because it gives away the con.

> What's yours?

That's the thing about bias: It's multifaceted, and often subconscious. I could list some biases I'm suspicious I have, but this list would be incomplete and inaccurate.

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

#165
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember Trump saying he would sign literally any immigration deal brought to him by a bipartisan group, and when they did what he asked he rejected it, thanks to Stephen Miller. Then Chuck Schumer basically told Trump to name how much he wanted for the wall, which Trump refused to do. Then the government shut down and Trump relished in blaming Democrats. > The left refused that compromise Why was a compromised nee…

Democrats should be willing to compromise because they value the DACA fix more than their opposition to border funding. They are instead doing the same thing Republicans did to Obama, refusing to compromise in order to whip up their base. Any politician that compromises an inch these days will be portrayed as an immoral enemy and attacked by some vocal part of their own base.

"They are instead doing the same thing Republicans did to Obama, refusing to compromise in order to whip up their base."

Democrats are in the minority though, not the majority like the Republicans had during Obama's tenure. If they want something done then they can do it.

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

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> robbing us of our right to defend ourselves Well, the problem with that narrative is that most of the center-left is quite happy to find a comprimise. It seems like arms dealers are too, actually. It's mostly the NRA unable to disengage its PR machine from collapsing the entire narrative to "you'll take our guns" vs "total gun freedom". So that itself is a good thing to bring up: it's impossible to disassemble with…

* Noting I'm arguing someone else's position. * >Well, the problem with that narrative is that most of the center-left is quite happy to find a comprimise. It seems like arms dealers are too, actually. It's mostly the NRA unable to disengage its PR machine from collapsing the entire narrative to "you'll take our guns" vs "total gun freedom". You too are collapsing the narrative to "NRA is evil." The power that the NR…

> You too are collapsing the narrative to "NRA is evil."

I'm not sure if the NRA is evil or not. I don't think "evil" is a very good label for Atheists to use, and I count myself among that cohort.

I think the NRA's published position matches with my account. I do not think it's a helpful or reasonable position.

> Pretending that the NRA is a rogue organization that doesn't represent a huge segment of the population is disingenuous.

Quite the contrary, I think the NRA represents a rather small segment of the population. They're trying to broaden that segment with significant cash outlay and with very misleading arguments that turn things like, "Bans on modifications that allow semi-automatic weapons to achieve >2r/s sustained fire rates" into "They hate our freedom and they're coming for our guns and it's time to strike back." That's a chartiable reading of NRATV's current message.

> Tell me again how Trump is a fascist and neo-Nazis are taking over the country.

"Taking over" is certainly not the word. "Have always been here and are increasingly more exposed." Unless of course we ignore the continued defense of openly self-labeled neo-nazi groups right out of Trump's own mouth, this is a factual reading of the situation.

> is under the thumb of Russia because of pee-pee tape

Any president would fall prey to this rumor. It's hilarious. I wish Obama had a pee-pee tape scandal. It's quintessentially American.

What's I hope less so is the direct and numerous conflicts of interest that have been poorly handled by the Trump admin, the numerous (denied) allegations of campaign finance violations that were then not only proven, but plead guilty to by Trump's cohort.

Again: you're equivocating based on utterly meaningless and boring things. Sure, some leftits are dumb. For the most part, the center-left media ignores the majority of these stories after they come out (as has been pointed out in other places, Fox brings up the pee tape more over time than any other outlet). Nor have I actually ever even heard the phrase, "Trump is a germophobe" come up except as a refutation.

All this is smoke and mirrors, and an attempt to deflect from the truly frightening admissions that folk who ran the Trump campaign's media have made. They're literally suggesting the use of human trafficking to run a sex entrapment extortion game on politicans and you're like, "Well the libs believe in a peepee tape." I'm sure some libs believe in UFOs too, but this doesn't dismiss or excuse the facts at hand.

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All news is based. Anyone telling you otherwise (that they are fair and balanced and unbiased) is lying to you. I don't need CNN to explicitly tell me their biases, because they are not my only source of news. It's not CNN's job to make sure i get unbiased news. It my job to make sense of biased news and weave it into a consistent mental model of the world. This let's me do things like watch CNN and Fox News and reco…

> All news is based. The truth isn't biased, so if the news reports the truth, "x said y" and we have evidence that x said y, then it is not biased and therefore all new is NOT biased.

That's not true at all. If I say "x said y", and don't tell you that "y said z", then that is biased, while telling you only the truth.

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- people trust local media - a single corporation owns a fuckton of those local stations - the same corporation writes a script to broadcast on every station - media hosts or journalists can't say "no". Do the job or lose your job. They're not free to report news without bias - you don't know everything about everything, so you're inclined to trust the news because they're supposed to be neutral and report facts - ul…

Not the person you're replying to, but I also have a hard time seeing the problem. Or rather, I can see the problem, but this is how I would've expected news to have been done for decades. I grew up when there was only 4 TV channels and no internet. I would have assumed CBS (or its parent) would have controlled all the CBS affiliates in this way in the 80s. NBC would do the same, etc.

It's one (sinclair) pretending to be many (local news stations).

Standard advice is check multiple sources. This pretends to be "multiple sources" when really it's just one.

Sinclair is effectively and echo chamber on TV. Web standards, don't like it, navigate else where. TV Standards, change the channel, get the same stuff. See how that is much more dangerous?

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

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not derailing, you are trying to split hairs to stifle discussion. Global media is pretty clearly biased against the current administration. It seems that Sinclair is the asymmetrical response. Discussing them in the larger context of the US news is completely valid.

It's hilarious. Just like Facebook privacy issues only blew up when it might have benefited Trump, but it was fine when Obama used that data (on a much larger scale), it's funny that NYT is suddenly paying attention to this coordinated reporting campaign when they and the national TV media parrot Media Matters all day, every day. It's easy to find a dozen examples of national TV talking heads all using the same phras…

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All news is based. Anyone telling you otherwise (that they are fair and balanced and unbiased) is lying to you. I don't need CNN to explicitly tell me their biases, because they are not my only source of news. It's not CNN's job to make sure i get unbiased news. It my job to make sense of biased news and weave it into a consistent mental model of the world. This let's me do things like watch CNN and Fox News and reco…

If all news is biased, why bother watching any it?

Why do you think bias makes something not worth watching?
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