‘Fake news’ campaign attacks real journalism
In these ginned-up, rashly opinionated times in the United States of America, with the press under fire, no citizen we know of is crying out for some new national voice criticizing those who bring us our news.
If anything, with so much news coming out of Washington, D.C., and with the internet’s constant feed and big-screen TVs everywhere bringing us the national 24-hour news cycle, what we are lacking is local news, followed by local commentary — a new localism as a blessed respite from the blare from the other side of the continent. A single-sized voice giving its opinions on what ails our country does not fit all.
That’s why it’s so troubling to find a relatively unknown but actually huge media company, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns more local television stations in the country than any other, ordering its local news anchors to read corporate-written editorials lambasting every other American news organization but its own.
The move was first reported by CNN, and then by NPR’s media reporter David Folkenflik, who noted that earlier this month, “Sinclair news anchors were told they would need to tape segments voicing their concerns about, quote, ‘the troubling trend of irresponsible and one-sided news stories plaguing our country.’ The script continued like this: ‘The sharing of bias and false views has become all too common on social media. More alarming, national media outlets are publishing these fake news stories without fact-checking.’”
They are? Come on down to the newsroom on deadline 365 days a year if you want to witness rigorous fact-checking, both of sources and reporters, before a story goes out.
There’s no cheering in the press box, except when a story gets it exceptionally right, and the chips fall where they may.
The quotes above are from a national promo; now local Sinclair anchors are told by corporate to say similar things in what are supposed to sound like their own words. That’s just wrong. And that’s why people who work for Sinclair told CNN they are upset by the orders, and why American University professor Jane Hall, a former media critic for Fox News, told NPR: “It’s naked in the sense that it’s forcing people in the news to read something that is a corporate piece of propaganda, in my opinion.”
Sinclair claims it’s being misunderstood, and that it only wants to show it supports real journalism. “The CNN story claimed our promotion message was an attack on national media, but our message is a warning about fake news circulating on social media,” says Scott Livingston, Sinclair’s vice president for news.
That’s newspeak nonsense. Yes, the company-tailored script does mention social-media sharing. But it specifically calls out everyone else that reports the news in this country with the apparent exception of Sinclair as publishers of “fake news.” And in a later script sent to local stations, Sinclair removed the qualifier “national” from its charges about “media outlets” that supposedly publish “fake news.”
Of course there is propaganda on Facebook and Twitter. No one needs Sinclair to tell us that. But just who are these just-the-facts “national media outlets” that are failing to fact-check? If the company has that news, then report it.