A Real Home of Real Fake News

August 25, 2017
Submitted by: Love Knowledge
Category: Media

The post A Real Home of Real Fake News appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

Lately, the media is just as much in the news as it is covering the news. Most of it we see. The power of Fox and Friends. The daily scoops from The New York Times and Washington Post. Sean Hannity and his talk-radio acolytes, the progressive mantra of MSNBC.

But one outlet is more pervasive than all these. Its 173 television stations, soon to be 216, broadcast into the living rooms of three-quarters of American homes. Its stations feed a daily diet of Trumpisms. Former FCC Chairman Michael Copps, has called it “the most dangerous company most people have never heard of.”

How did it get so powerful? Who runs it? And why, during the 2016 campaign, did it do 15 interviews with Donald Trump and zero with Hillary Clinton?

These are just a few of the questions in this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, as Jeff Schechtman talks to journalist Lucia Graves. Graves is a US correspondent for The Guardian who has looked deeply into Sinclair and whose article This is Sinclair, “the most dangerous US Company you never heard of,” appears in the August 17th issue of The Guardian.

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Full Text Transcript:

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Jeff Schechtman:	Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. I’m Jeff Schechtman. Mostly as a result of the cacophony of news about the media itself, we know who the players are. The blonde ambition of Fox, the blaring at war posture of Breitbart, Talk Radio and its collection of Hannity acolytes, the progressive voice of MSNBC, and the renewed investigative journalism of The Washington Post and The New York Times.
	However, the company you may not know is the one that below the radar may be the most insidious, most effective and most in service of the current administration. Sinclair Broadcasting controls 173 local television stations and is looking to buy 43 more. If it does it will have, to mix metaphors, its right wing tentacles into three quarters of the living rooms of America.
	Today, we’re going to focus on Sinclair with my guest, Lucia Graves. She’s a US columnist for the Guardian. She’s previously been a staff correspondent for the National Journal, and a staff reporter at The Huffington Post. It is my pleasure to welcome Lucia Graves here to talk about her article in The Guardian: This is Sinclair, “the most dangerous US company you’ve never heard of.”
	Lucia, thanks so much for joining us.
Lucia Graves:	Thanks so much for having me today.
Jeff Schechtman:	Great to have you here. First of all, tell us a little bit about the history of Sinclair. Where did this company come from? Where did it get started?
Lucia Graves:	Well, it’s headquartered just outside Baltimore and it was founded under another name in ’71, actually, but it wasn’t until more recently that it became sort of a political point of interest. The founder was Julian Sinclair Smith and he was described as the patriarch of the Smith family, which now owns Sinclair, and he was more of a technical person. He started out in radio and then sort of gradually shifted to television, but his four sons, who’ve taken over the business, have taken it in a more sort of explicitly political direction.
Jeff Schechtman:	And it has been, certainly of late, a blatantly political direction, even more so in many ways than Fox and what we’ve seen there in terms of it’s really insisting that it’s message get out through its local stations.
Lucia Graves:	Yeah, well I think one of the concerns that a lot of people have is the apparent relationship it has with Trump’s FCC, the regulatory body for media in the US. Since Trump took office, the head of the FCC has made a number of moves that make it easier for Sinclair to expand its reach to 72 percent of American households, which is twice the number of households that used to previously be legal, but they’ve relaxed regulations to make it possible for Sinclair to move forward with this big merger. And they haven’t signed off.