The Facts of Life: If you thought Fox was bad…

Here’s Sinclair Broadcasting!

Which is going after the Southern Poverty Law Center, the superlative non-profit that investigates and names hate groups:

Sinclair is known for requiring its local news stations to air “must-run” segments that often look like right-wing propaganda. These must-runs come as hate groups and other right-wing organizations have ramped up their years-long campaign against SPLC in 2017.

Get into the SPLC site, click on the Hate Group map and click on the multitude of dots naming hate groups. Reading the names of these groups is especially illuminating, since they are all, like the Koch Bros massive collection of propaganda groups, labeled with anodyne names with which no one could disagree. Americans for Prosperity? Who on this great green earth would disagree with prosperity? (Yeah, I should call them Orwellian names. OK, Orwellian names. There, I’ve done it.) (And you do realize I’m being especially nasty by writing “great green earth,” since everything the Kochs are about comes down to making our earth brown.)

The excerpt above is from the MediaMatters story about the dark workings of Sinclair. And it reminded me to contribute — it’s a tax deduction — to MediaMatters, a crucial fact-checking resource in these parlous times.

This story is an ah-ha moment for me, given that it explains why a friend of mine has been excoriating SPLC on his blog, accusing it of all sorts of nefarity. (No, it’s not a word but still…)

When I saw those posts, I was startled, given my decades-long awareness of and appreciation for the SPLC. Now I understand: he was suckered by alt-right propaganda.

I think I’m working on a short book, a manual called How I Learned the Facts of Life. If I do get it into proposal shape, I might dedicate it to the very smart, even brilliant people I know who are apparently not immune from brainwashing.

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