The Voice of Sinclair
Sinclair Broadcasting owns television stations. Growing up in my family, with Dad running a television station in Dayton, Ohio (WLW-D now WDTN) we learned at a young age that just because a station broadcast NBC, ABC or CBS (the only choices in those days) didn’t mean that the network owned them. The station was a network “affiliate,” a deal was made for the station to run the network’s programming in order to get some advertising time during the network’s time.
But the owner of the station was the company that hired or fired employees, set the rules, and owned the buildings. In my father’s days he worked for three; Crosley, then Avco, and finally Multimedia. Dad was in Dayton for eight years, and the station went through three owners.
Sinclair Broadcasting owns one hundred seventy three stations in the United State today, in eighty markets. In the central Ohio market, they own WSYX (channel six), and they also have a management contract to run WTTE (channel twenty-eight.) They are currently asking the Federal Communication Commission if they can buy another fifty stations, ultimately reaching seventy-five percent of the United States. The FCC, the same group that ended “net neutrality” a couple of months ago so that internet providers could find more ways to profit from internet speed, is controlled by Republicans, so Sinclair’s politically conservative view will get a sympathetic hearing.
There is a valid argument that the FCC should prevent any one media source from so dominating the market. In the past, there were rules in place to prevent such massive saturation, and those rules served us well. Today, broadcasters are acting on the rules as they exist, and it’s hard to blame Sinclair for expanding their business.
This past weekend, Sinclair Broadcasting had many of its local “news anchors” read the same script, decrying “fake news” and “bias in the media.” Sinclair owns the stations, Sinclair employ the news anchors; those anchors did as they were told.
Sinclair is a private corporation, and has every right to have an editorial voice on the stations they own. Even back in the 1960’s, my father the station manager would occasionally read an editorial representing the corporation’s views (and we kids would gladly critique how he did on TV.) When USA Today, a newspaper marketed throughout the country, writes an editorial it goes out to the nation. So do they “national” newspapers like the Wall Street Journal (owned by Rupert Murdoch of Fox News fame) the New York Times and the Washington Post. It’s on the editorial page.
And Sinclair has a corporate spokesman that they use as part of their newscast. Boris Epshteyn, a former spokesman for the Trump campaign, now does editorial segments that are shown on the Sinclair stations. So what’s the big deal about Sinclair sending a script for their local news anchors to read.
The difference is the blending of factual news and editorial opinion. We have an expectation, especially of local news reporters, that they will give us the facts about the stories they report, without their own opinions. And while that distinction is more difficult to make on the national level, the news reporters of NBC, CBS and ABC (and NPR) are still generally reporting “the facts.” This is not as true of “cable news” of course, where it sometimes is difficult to determine bias, from CNN to MSNBC, and, Fox News.
But we expect the local news to gives us the facts (in fact, the National Association of Broadcasters is running an advertising campaign based on that expectation.) And when our trusted local reporter reads an editorial script provided by the national owner, it blurs the lines. Is this “facts” as in news, or is this “opinion” as in not news (or as the President might decry – fake news?)
We are a nation of “buckets.” Folks listen or read or see the news from the sources that agree with their existing political opinion. It might be why MSNBC is locked onto our televisions (on now as I type.) It’s also why I sometimes find the need to get out of my comfort zone, and watch Fox News for a while (but not for long.) But local television: Colleen and Mike, Stacia and Bob, and Jerry and Yolanda; we depend on them for facts about traffic, city government, fires, and all the events of local importance. When they get stuffed into political buckets, we lose an important source of information.
Sinclair can editorialize, but they should keep the lines clear.
Don Dahlman (1980) VP Multimedia Broadcasting
