So many things to be scared about lately.
The political control of TV news–a major medium–is on top of my list. And this BillMoyers.com article by Eric Alterman (who wrote it originally for The Nation) tells us what we should know about Sinclair Broadcasting, about to acquire TV news domination in many already dumbed-down parts of the country.
And we thought it had been entirely Fox-ed? Nah. Fox is about to have competition in the world of Big Lies.
I’ve pulled a few excerpts but tell you it’s radically unfair of me to do this. For full fright value you must read the entire piece.
Sinclair is a far-right media operation that until recently has flown under the radar of all but the most studious media critics. It received brief scrutiny in December, when it was revealed that Jared Kushner had struck a deal with the company to give it special access to Donald Trump in exchange for a promise to run Trump interviews across the country without commentary. These were especially important to the campaign in swing states like Ohio, where Sinclair reaches many more viewers than networks like CNN.
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Now the company is poised to take over Tribune Media in a $3.9 billion deal. Add Tribune’s 42 stations to the 173 that Sinclair already owns, and you’ve got the single biggest conglomerate of TV stations in America, reaching 70 percent of all households in the nation.
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In an impressive recent segment on HBO’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver noted that Sinclair sends scripts to its local news anchors to be delivered verbatim together with the clips it wants shown. Among these are “questions” like “Did the FBI have a personal vendetta in pursuing the Russian investigation against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn?”
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So on the one hand, far-right extremists [the Mercer family, David Packer, et al.] with next to no commitment to traditional journalistic standards are seeking to expand their empire to the point where their version of “reality” will soon overwhelm the reporting from what remains of the mainstream media. On the other hand, those institutions — under intense financial and political pressure — are increasingly caving in to demands that they tailor their coverage to make it more consistent with the fantasy world promoted by Trump and his acolytes.
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CNN head Jeff Zucker, recently profiled in The New York Times Magazine as a lonely defender of truth under fire from a hostile White House, not only guided Trump’s career at NBC, he practically turned CNN over to the huckster during the campaign.
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MSNBC, meanwhile, has been on a hiring spree of right-wing hacks like Hugh Hewitt, Charlie Sykes, Greta Van Susteren (since fired) and George Will, who will join Elise Jordan, Steve Schmidt, Michael Steele, Rick Tyler, Nicolle Wallace, Scarborough and the execrable Mark Halperin on this allegedly “liberal” counterpart to Fox.
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Finally, inside the White House press corps, faux-news organizations like the racist Breitbart, Laura Ingraham’s silly LifeZette, Tucker Carlson’s dumbass Daily Caller and the ridiculous One America are treated as the real thing while actual journalists are barred from being allowed to do their jobs. And when they do manage to do their jobs and expose the criminal idiocy and dishonesty that passes for “policy” in this administration, they find themselves threatened with retributory violence from troglodyte Trump supporters — all the worse for them if they happen to be Jews.