corrente

Media centralization and message management. Screwing down the lid on democracy one local television station at a time. More background info on Sinclair...

From April of last year - The Death of Local News, By Paul Schmelzer, AlterNet. Posted April 23, 2003:

Tune into the evening news on Madison, Wisconsin's Fox TV affiliate and behold the future of local news. In the program's concluding segment, "The Point," Mark Hyman rants against peace activists ("wack-jobs"), the French ("cheese-eating surrender monkeys"), progressives ("loony left") and the so-called liberal media, usually referred to as the "hate-America crowd" or the "Axis of Drivel." Colorful, if creatively anemic, this is TV's version of talk radio, with the precisely tanned Hyman playing a second-string Limbaugh.

Fox 47's right-wing rants may be the future of hometown news, but -- believe it or not -- it's not the program's blatant ideological bias that is most worrisome. Here's the real problem: Hyman isn't the station manager, a local crank, or even a journalist. He is the Vice President of Corporate Communications for the station's owner, the Sinclair Broadcast Group. And this segment of the local news isn't exactly local. Hyman's commentary is piped in from the home office in Baltimore, MD, and mixed in with locally-produced news. Sinclair aptly calls its innovative strategy "NewsCentral" - it is very likely to spell the demise of local news as we know it.

[...]

Today, Sinclair touts itself as "the nation's largest commercial television broadcasting company not owned by a network." You've probably never heard of them because the 62 stations they run -- garnering 24 percent of the national TV audience -- fly the flags of the networks they broadcast: ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and the WB.

[...]

And like Clear Channel's CEO L. Lowry Mays -- a major Republican donor and onetime business associate of George W. Bush -- the Sinclair family, board, and executives ply the GOP with big money. Since 1997, they have donated well over $200,000 to Republican candidates.

[...]

Sinclair's news department also takes a page out of Clear Channel's book of non-localized programming. [...] To maintain the appearance of local news, the Baltimore on-air staff is coached on the intricacies of correct local pronunciations. Or the weatherman, safely removed from the thunderstorms in, say, Minneapolis, will often engage in scripted banter with the local anchor to maintain the pretense: "Should I bring an umbrella tomorrow, Don?" "You bet, Hal, it looks pretty ugly out there..."

[...]

Journalists have been pondering the specter of centralized news operations for some time, both because it affects the quality of news and because it could put them out of a job.

Putting people out of jobs, outsourcing local control to control the locals, consolidating power and wealth in the hands of a few to manipulate the many -- there ya have it -- the Bu$h Corporation's "vision" for America's future. Thank you for being a passive consumer.

(more to Alternet article...see link above)

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