John Oliver: Sinclair Broadcasting brings 'troubling' rightwing bias to local news | Television & radio

John Oliver: Sinclair Broadcasting brings 'troubling' rightwing bias to local news | Television & radio

John Oliver took a look at the Sinclair group on Sunday night, examining the conservative-leaning station’s ownership of many local news networks.

“Our main story tonight concerns the potential problems in corporate consolidation of local news,” Oliver began. “National cable news gets a lot of attention with their big budgets and their fancy graphics packages. Meanwhile, local news often has to do a lot more with a lot less.”

He went on to show clips of broadcaster Mark Hyman railing against “political correctness and multiculturalism”.

“Hyman is a commentator and former executive at Sinclair Broadcast Group, and Sinclair may be the most influential media company you’ve never heard of,” Oliver explained. “Not only are they the largest owner of local TV stations in the country, they could soon get even bigger,” referring to the company’s proposed $4bn acquisition of all Tribune Media stations.

Oliver continued: “It is a little disconcerting to learn that something you’ve only just heard of is throwing around $4bn. It’s like finding out that Exxon Mobil just got bought, and it was by the little twerp who plays the new Spider-Man. Now, this acquisition still needs regulatory approval, but it is widely assumed that that will happen, at which point Sinclair’s reach could expand dramatically.”

The Last Week Tonight host then showed several examples of typical Sinclair broadcasts, which lean “noticeably conservative” and even conspiratorial in nature.

“If the opinions were confined to just the commentary or the ad breaks, that would be one thing. But Sinclair can sometimes dictate the content of your local newscasts as well, and in contrast to Fox News, a conservative outlet where you basically know what you’re getting, with Sinclair, they’re injecting Fox-worthy content into the mouths of your local news anchors, the two people who you know, and who you trust, and whose on-screen chemistry can usually best be described as two people.

“You may not realize it’s happening,” Oliver warned, “because Sinclair and its digital news subsidiary Circa not only produce and send packages to their stations; they even write scripts that local anchors use to introduce the pieces. For example, this Tuesday night, anchors at Sinclair stations all over the country introduced a story about Michael Flynn like this.”

Footage showed multiple Sinclair broadcasters in different locales introducing a report about Flynn, president Trump’s former national security adviser, who is a key person of interest in the FBI’s Russia probe, by calling the investigation a “personal vendetta.”

“Now, the story they were teasing was that Michael Flynn had apparently spoken on behalf of a former FBI agent in a gender discrimination suit against the agency,” Oliver said, “but it is a huge stretch to get from there to an agency-wide conspiracy to bring him down. The problem is, there is real power in hearing your trusted local newscasters using FBI and personal vendetta in a sentence. If those same newscasters somehow used the word Daniel Stern and explosive ejaculation in the same sentence, you could never watch Home Alone again.”

Oliver went on to detail different segments airing on Sinclair-owned stations.

“Perhaps the most troubling thing of all is that Sinclair has a daily must-run segment called the terrorism alert desk. That’s right, they report on terror every single day, whether there is something major to report on or not, which means sometimes the updates contain things like this,” Oliver explained, showing a segment about a “birkini” ban.

“That is not about terrorism,” Oliver quipped. “It’s just about Muslims. By that definition, terrorism is anything a Muslim does. Tonight, Mahershala Ali on the cover of GQ, Kareem Abdul Jabbar sneezed in an airport, and happy birthday to Fareed Zakaria. This has been your terrorism alert desk.”

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