The Sinclair Broadcast Group: An Affront to Democracy
The Progressive Teen Staff Writer
Maybe you’ve seen the eerie video… A compilation of the 193 stations Sinclair Broadcast Group owns reading a statement verbatim at the end of a routine broadcast.
“This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.” Ironically, this claim, which commenced the Sinclair Broadcast monologue, had a two-fold meaning. In one sense, the message seems anti-fake news, with trusted local anchors alert and aware of their responsibility to produce “quality and balanced” journalism within their communities. In a very different sense, when you view the mash-up of all 193 stations scattered across the country reading the same statement, the bias is hard to deny. In an event similar to what might be found in the novel 1984, local journalists were forced to read the same words, claiming to be waging a war on fake news. By definition, Sinclair’s monologue is fake news: its claims that media has been ostensibly marred by “liberal bias” bares eery similarity to the Cambridge Dictionary’s description of “fake stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views.”
This is just one threatening tactic used by a blatant special interest group to influence thinking people. The repetition of the spoken word statement might not have been discerned if the jarring compilation had not gone viral in mere hours; that is how fast social media can circulate information. Now is the time to be thinking of social media and its capabilities as a strength to democracy, a way to keep citizens around the country informed of multiple sides of a story at a time, and as a way to keep the people in power honest. With affronts like the Sinclair scandal front and center, it is time to be vigilant in where we get our news and how we process it.
Sinclair is an inherently politically biased source: in the 2016 election, the company ordered stations to feature “must run scripts” that praised Trump or critiqued the Clinton campaign. Their anchors have made outlandish claims that voter fraud was responsible for the Obama victory in 2012 and networks have been coerced into featuring avowed Alt-Right anchor Boris Epshteyn on broadcasts.
On the whole, Sinclair’s monologue fiasco represents the discordant nature of modern media. On one hand, the electorate is desperately searching for political news, yet the infringement of this political news onto dishonesty fractures our political system. The quest for truth in media has faced yet another misstep with Sinclair’s broadcasting turmoil.
