However, this entire situation is ultimately a consequence of revoking the FCC fairness doctrine. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine)
For example, a news station did have their license revoked by taking a strong stance against civil rights, and violated the fairness doctrine. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WLBT#Opposition_to_civil_right...)
It was never applied to a sitation where a network required "must run" content. At best, the fairness doctrine would require at least some dissenting opinion on the issue. The Supreme Court, in upholding the fairness doctrine, said it should never be used to limit speech. That's what critics want to do here, punish Sinclair for running content.
Arguably, the fairness doctrine is no longer constitutional at all. The court's reasoning relied on there being limited channels. That is no longer true. Even on broadcast, there are 20 channels available. If democrats don't like Sinclair, they can go start their own network. When you consider all the other sorts of media available, its just not credible to argue that there is a legitmate concern that people cannot be both sides of an issue.
I (a layperson) don't really follow this. It sounds to me like "while the rules were in effect, they were rarely broken".
>an era when there were only 3 stations. But this situation is different.
Lots of station numbers, run by just a handful of owners:
http://www.neatorama.com/2008/07/07/who-owns-what-on-televis...
Sure the number of channels is higher, but the amount of information spread is not.
I can’t think of the last time I saw broadcast local news.
Its just not constitutional to ban Sinclair for running pro GOP content.
Most of the so called news / journalism isn't news / journalism any more than Aspartame is sugar. If you can't call Aspartame sugar then consuming content should be forced to be as transparent.
News was never news. It was actually branding by the news industry in the 20th century that duped everyone into thinking that news was objective. If you are interested, go look at what newspapers were in the 1800s. They were propaganda outfits created by wealthy individuals to push agenda. The oldest newspaper in the US ( NY Post ) was a propaganda organization created by Madison to attack Thomas Jefferson and his agrarian ideals. The highest prize in journalism is the pulitzer prize which is named for the founder of yellow journalism.
I think we are better off removing the lie that news is objective and go back to the truth. News is propaganda. I think it'll be healthy for the nation to accept reality rather than blindly accepting an idealized falsehood.
> Call me crazy but it's time for a legal definition of news (vs editorial) and then have that definition forced.
How? That's an impossibility. For example, when CNN, MSNBC, NYTimes, WaPo write favorable anti-2nd amendment "news" articles and Foxnews write favorable pro-2nd amendment "news" articles, how are you going to define objectivity?
Are we going to have biased government officials deciding what objective news is? Do you trust obama or trump to decide what is biased and what isn't biased? I certainly don't.
I think all news should contain labeling informing the public that these organizations are all propaganda organizations with heavy biases and let the public consume as they see fit. Just like with cigarettes, alcohol, soda, etc.
I certainly don't want government deciding what is objective.
This is no different then the replication crisis in science.
If you want to be taken seriously, show your work. Sources, hard data, citations, on the record quotes, analysis.
Otherwise it's just gossip, agitprop, heresay.
What I think it’s time for is to demand personal responsibility for critically thinking about what you read or listen to.
The state cannot ever be trusted to control what you watch, read, or listen to, full stop. This has only ever ended in disaster, and we’ve known this for centuries.
When people who don’t like what someone is saying call for government to stop that person from speaking, and that person isn’t directly inciting violence, I would kindly ask those people to fuck off. Maybe move to a more totalitarian regime if that’s to their liking.
News, editorials, and political commentary are nothing at all like the ingredient list on the back of your soda can.
There is also the legal concept of false advertising. If you're saying (objective) "news" and it's (subjective) editorial, then that's clearly false advertising.
This wasn't the most exciting things I ever read, but it was helpful.
"Freedom for the Thought That We Hate" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_for_the_Thought_That_W...
re: "News, editorials, and political commentary are nothing at all like the ingredient list on the back of your soda can."
One, this is editorial pure.
Two, it's also false. We know that you are what you consume. Whether that's what goes in your mouth, your lungs, up your nose, or into your brain.
Is you can't label Aspartame as sugar, then why should editorial being called news be allowed? Context matters.
The sad part would be that even after this, people would still look to the Hannitys, the Maddows, the Carlsons, the Lemons of the world for their news. I understand the reasoning behind it (zero effort way of processing news). Where it does become dangerous is if someone turns a non-news/fake news item into a talking point to deceive the viewer into thinking it is legitimate like the content based on real news items.
I guess the beginning of the end was to allow channels specific to "news" to propagate. In an ever growing fight for ratings, something if we're being honest that shouldn't be a news team's goal, they've had to at best fluff the news or at worst make it controversial for ratings sake. I like CNN and feel them to be fairly "even", but even I have to question the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" nature of constant BREAKING NEWS items that are on their site at any given time and I would imagine is pretty frequent on social media (at least, anything I see shared from CNN seems to have breaking: at the beginning).
Maybe the local news showing national/international news format would be best, but with some kind of regulation to prevent them from politicizing it. Now what that would be defined by, I'm not sure. It probably wouldn't be heavy in ratings though.
Even they heyday of "unbiased", "impartial" news was anything but--there just weren't many outlets for people to express dissenting views, and the lack of transparency was shocking at times. For example, Lyndon Johnson once got annoyed at reporters asking him why the US intervened in Vietnam, exposed his genitalia to them, and shouted, "this is why!"
The notion of a kindly old Walter Crokite-esque gentleman telling us the news every night in a fair and impartial way was always an illusion, and it's one that shouldn't be mourned.
"Network" [1978] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/
"De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" [1980] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v2GDbEmjGE
All that said, I am ... hesitant about such a system. It would be immensely controversial, and puts a lot more power in the hands of government over the news content Americans watch every day. The only way to assuage my concerns about that is to make the base standards a pretty lower bar, just things about confirming stories and requiring the submission of corrections and redactions when needed. And add in something to protect journalists, so that the government can't revoke a new source's accreditation because they leaked CIA documents about torture or something else embarrassing to the government. Maybe model it more like university accreditation, where accreditation of news sources involves the input from NGOs and regional government entities.
There's also some question about how helpful it would really be: I imagine the people who watch Info Wars aren't going to stop because it doesn't have the government seal of approval. I think you'd need to give a lot in subsidies or benefits to accredited news sources to give them an edge.
6 of one, half dozen of the other.
If I tell you a vote in congress passed, that doesn't really tell me much without saying whether the vote was expected to pass or not, or why, or what the vote passing means, etc. And that's all opinion. Even if you try to present it factually it's all judgement.
Better still, "What we don't know is..." The gaps in the analysis are never pointed out. Yes, that makes it opinion. Nothing wrong with that, but then it's not analysis, and certainly not transparent in the journalism sense of the word.
The problem is, stuff with obvious _glaring_ holes gets presented as full-investigated and complete.
You got facts ... the who, what when, where. No analysis, no spin, no entertainment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGJh8VnHZGw
If someone were to do this today in print, audio or video, I would gladly pay $50 a month. Information only with no opinion or analysis.
"The Media Can Legally Lie" [2003] https://web.archive.org/web/20100421103357/http://www.projec...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Akre#Whistleblower_lawsui...
Thus, lawsuites would be allowed if your org was found to be intentionally lying. But unless someone can prove you did it intentionally, they have no case.
Obviously you can lie all you want if you take the word "News" out of your name.
"Communications during emergencies and crisis must be available for public safety, health, defense, and emergency personnel, as well as all consumers in need. The Nation's critical communications infrastructure must be reliable, interoperable, redundant, and rapidly restorable."
The honest thing is that the FCC has already shown itself to be a problem by allowing the media mergers and aquisitions in the first place, and the people who made those decisions should be held to account as far as the statue of limitations allows, but also should the institution (preferably by congress).
I'm starting to get really tired of "independent" government agencies being at the heart of root problems.
Boris Alexandrovich Epshteyn (Russian: Бори́с Алекса́ндрович Эпштейн; born August 14, 1982) is a Russian-born American Republican political strategist, investment banker, and attorney. He is currently the Chief Political Analyst at Sinclair Broadcast Group. He was a senior advisor to Donald Trump's 2016 campaign for President of the United States, and previously worked on the McCain-Palin campaign. Following Trump's election, he was named director of communications for the Presidential Inaugural Committee, and then assistant communications director for surrogate operations in the administration, until he resigned in March 2017.
TL;DR: The guy in charge of political programming for Sinclair worked for Trump, both on the campaign and in the white house.
Having said that, two things:
1) I'm glad it was exposed and wish it were highlighted more than it was. This gives viewers the ability to discern how valuable they find the content to know that scripts were dictated to their newspeople.
2) I'm hoping, though doubtful, that this prevents Sinclair from buying up other small market stations as they've shown their hand as to what they'd do with a monopoly.
It has always been this way.
So a large media company recognized the problem of bias in the media, which could become a business problem if it affects confidence in their news reporting, and invited people to contact them if they noticed this problem creeping into the individual news stations’ reports. Where is the controversy here?
And if you believe they are somehow incapable of noticing biases: how would they adjudicate any complaints they get?
That request for comments is either a McGuffin needed to have a reason for the preceding rant slamming all other media outlets.
Or it's a ploy to get local stations in line with Sinclair's corporate agenda, by asking their viewers to rat them out to headquarters.
So if I’m a media company and I see complaints about my stations or a decline in news viewership, I’m going to take steps to stop it from happening. Companies often don’t know that they have problems until customers express their opinions about them, and so Sinclair is trying to keep an open dialogue with their viewers. Since when is asking customers how they feel about your service a bad thing?
One message went pretty viral recently, but I am unsure why you are focused on that single message. Many scripted messages are being passed to local stations with the requirement to read the script without informing viewers that it is a script the local newscasters are required to read. That is the issue, not the message itself.
With great power comes great responsibility.
(2012) http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-...
If you think that these companies aren't pushing a viewpoint you got another thing coming. Hint: It's pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist, anti-worker, and anti-political dissenters.
Sinclair can easily lose its trust with its viewers let alone its own talent and that can effect change. There is already scripted news out there that presents facts in a similar manner. It all comes down to, who is upset by it?
if Washington politicians are the ones upset then I am not concerned. They already exert such control over the media by simply coercing news to play nice or lose access that we should always be worried when they want to stifle any speech.
It's unprecedented. It's not about which politics the story supports, it's about the media and public being manipulated. Ajit Pai's response shows he either doesn't understand that or wants everyone else to think it's about something else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLXQ0qbq6jY
In fact it was a regular segment on his show. This was 10 years ago. Further more, during the second Iraq War local new stations owned by Sinclair aired pro war talking points (even NPR read them), word by word.
If you go back to Bill Clinton, there's a video of him doing this and saying how great it is. This was satellite feed that was broadcasted to remote stations, omebody was able to record the feeds and hear all the conversations. It was basically scripted at the local news level.
There's other evidence to but I don't want to get into it on this site, its overwelming and dark. If we can get just one victory against this crap I'll take it.
It is questionable when a monopoly of unheard of before size is saying "most other media sources are dangerous for our democracy", especially when it involves gaslighting.
