Multiple local news stations say the same thing verbatim [video] (opens in new tab)

A stealth tech company in Calif-US created a system to record as many news casts as possible, 24-7, and invoke the closed-caption system to annotate it, and make it searchable. The company was sold in the early 2000's for $1B+ ; I have never seen the name in any tech news.

source: colleague was a core engineer there

That bill was about "propaganda" like VOA... which is mandated to provide pretty damn fair and accurate news by other laws. Do you really think it should have remained (technically) illegal to click this link: https://www.voanews.com/ ?

In any case, that law/amendment has nothing to do with the video in this post. The reason all these stations are saying the same thing is not because of the government, it is because they are all owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, and those who run that company wanted to push this message.

Honestly, the quality of "government propaganda" from VOA is better than what we get from Sinclair.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/voice-of-america/

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/sinclair-broadcast-group/

I used to work for a local newspaper that had been operated by the owner's family for generations. Our content was almost entirely unique, with the exception of a few filler stories we'd occasionally pull from another source (small stuff like "Spring Cleaning Tips"). The owner was proud that we were the last small newspaper in the state to resist being bought up by the owner of the capitol city's paper. We were well-respected in the area, and it was joked that the only time we lost a subscriber was when they passed away. The owner died a few years ago. Her sons didn't want to keep her "hobby project" afloat, so the paper finally was sold like all the others.

A couple of years later I wrote a script to consolidate stories from news sites across my state and display them with a nice UI, since I have family all over the place and want to keep up with what's going on. The majority of stories were duplicated across all of them, and local news had become the filler content. Even for stories of national importance, they can be interpreted in so many ways that you'd expect different people in different areas to have different analyses of the facts (which is what used to happen), but that doesn't exist anymore. With the pushback against "fake news", official news sources are the only acceptable source of information, and those are monopolized by an increasingly tiny minority of people. BTW I don't put "fake news" in quotes to say that it doesn't exist, but that it's a catch-all term for propaganda that goes against the official propaganda.

That's absolutely true. I understand that this particular piece is a step beyond that: a 'must run' segment that was mandated by corporate (something for which Sinclair has form).

That phenomenon has nothing to do with the linked video, though. They are totally different. One is news, from news agencies, the other is corporate right-wing propaganda from the owner of the station.

This is Sinclair, and I find it extremely funny that the right has taken this video to smear the rest of the MSM.

Thanks for the context!

Yep, here's another a 90 second clip demonstrating how Sinclair is a rightwing media news org, also using the same forced talking points across the board: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

I heard once that the ten o clock news is when the presenter starts with a "good evening" then explains why it's not.

There's a difference from everyone quoting from an AP or Reuters new service. It's an entirely different thing when one media company forces it's stations to literally read from the exact same script, or worse, force a must-run segment produced externally from the local station.

The classic Onion News Network videos are proof of your point. They're hilarious because while the content is ridiculous, the rhythm and theatrics are so clearly shared with every other newscast.

Tangent, but to my American ear, the British English sense of "presenter" -- someone who reads the news -- seems to acknowledge the theatrical aspect of the role. More so than our "anchorperson" which seems to come from a game show.

The sites in those results (at least the 10 I checked) are all low quality blog spam. I suspect this is a politically motivated spam network created for the purpose of then using it as an example of media bias. Similar to what's happened in the parent story actually!

The new strategy is to saturate social media with the same talking points ad-nauseam. It’s especially apparent on Reddit and Twitter.

> Televised news is harmful manipulative crap.

Not all news stations are the same, not all countries have the same TV news.

It is easy to just give up and think that you cannot trust anyone. But, the reality is that there is many journalists that care and try to create high quality news. To put them all in one bag is not fair, nor helpful.

TV is a propaganda arm or the big companies. They will continue to spread the same type of content on other media, as long as they have money.

They might repost news from the AP, but not opinion pieces.