A week ago I wrote an extended post on Sinclair Broadcasting Group's attempts to dominate local television news. (WTOV in Steubenville is a Sinclair-owned station.) Here are a couple of additional articles.
The New York Times continued its coverage of Sinclair with a report on Sinclair's requirement that local stations run certain Sinclair-produced conservative news reports:
They are called “must-runs,” and they arrive every day at television stations owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group — short video segments that are centrally produced by the company. Station managers around the country are directed to work them into the broadcast over a period of 24 or 48 hours.
Since November 2015, Sinclair has ordered its stations to run a daily segment from a “Terrorism Alert Desk” with updates on terrorism-related news around the world. During the election campaign last year, it sent out a package that suggested in part that voters should not support Hillary Clinton because the Democratic Party was historically pro-slavery. More recently, Sinclair asked stations to run a short segment in which Scott Livingston, the company’s vice president for news, accused the national news media of publishing “fake news stories.”
Meanwhile, there appears to be growing opposition to the Sinclair merger that was announced last week. Broadcast and Cable, an industry trade publication, wrote about it Thursday:
Anti-consolidation group Free Press is urging supporters to tell the FCC to block the Sinclair-Tribune Merger.
Calling the combo "Trump TV,” Free Press provides an online submission form on its website where the following comment can be sent to the commission:
"Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tribune should never be allowed to merge. If this deal goes through, a single company would own more than 200 local-TV stations reaching more than 70 percent of the country. That's far beyond the legal limits on media ownership and far too much power in the hands of a single company . . ."
It claims Sinclair "[slips] right-wing views and Republican talking points into its newscasts" and the Free Press website links to stories about an ex-Trump spokesperson joining Sinclair and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner allegedly claiming to have struck a deal with Sinclair for coverage of the campaign. Sinclair has denied there was any such deal.
(Here's a link to the Free Press site.)
Vox also explains with:
The imminent conservative takeover of local TV news, explained
