The Sinclair Propaganda Network

This is a serious problem and is going to get worse before it gets better:

Earlier this month, CNN’s Brian Stelter broke the news that Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner or operator of nearly 200 television stations in the U.S., would be forcing its news anchors to record a promo about “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.” The script, which parrots Donald Trump’s oft-declarations of developments negative to his presidency as “fake news,” brought upheaval to newsrooms already dismayed with Sinclair’s consistent interference to bring right-wing propaganda to local television broadcasts.

You might remember Sinclair from its having been featured on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight last year, or from its requiring in 2004 of affiliates to air anti-John Kerry propaganda, or perhaps because it’s your own local affiliate running inflammatory “Terrorism Alerts” or required editorials from former Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, he of the famed Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that failed to mention Jewish people. (Sinclair also owns Ring of Honor wrestling, Tennis magazine, and the Tennis Channel.)

The net result of the company’s current mandate is dozens upon dozens of local news anchors looking like hostages in proof-of-life videos, trying their hardest to spit out words attacking the industry they’d chosen as a life vocation.

Not that any of it matters to Sinclair, which, with the help of a friendly federal government, is about to swallow up another 40 television stations—increasing its reach and its lead over competitors like Hearst and Scripps.

Pursuant to our recent discussion about the immense damage that can be done by true believers, it’s also important to note that Sinclair is something worse than venal:

New paper by @joshmccrain & Gregory Martin. Changes in media ownership are reducing attention to local news, pushing a more conservative line, and actually losing viewers. https://t.co/5JqT8lWr6o pic.twitter.com/Hd9HJUAHns

— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) March 31, 2018

If Sinclair cared only about profits, it would be less dangerous. You don’t have news anchors in markets like Seattle read right-wing talking points if you’re trying to make as much money as possible. Sinclair is willing to sacrifice profits to advance its ideological agenda.

Whenever we have a discussion about the latest conservative affirmative action hire made by an elite publication, people strain to argue that these hires are cynical ploys to maximize profits. But the explanations offered by people like Bennet and Goldberg — that they sincerely think their readers should be challanged and subject to a (certain narrow kind of) opinion diversity — are far more plausible than arguments that they’re actually lying profit-takers and well-compensated pundits actually produce enough marginal unique visitors to more than pay for themselves. (If you know anything about online ad rates, the cynical explanation is in fact quite bonkers.) There certainly are many newspapers in this country being run to maximize profits, and they look nothing like the New York Times and Washington Post. And obviously it’s good in many respects that they’re not run solely to make money — profit-maximizing hacks wouldn’t have hired Bret Stephens but they also wouldn’t publish exceptional, resource-intensive investigative journalism either. David Simon actually did a good job of illustrating this in Season 5 of The Wire — a lot of problems with contemporary American journalism come from corporate cost-cutting, but there are also a lot of problems created by potentially noble ambitions gone wrong. The many blunders of the Times political desk in 2016 were much more the latter problem than the former.

Acting on principle isn’t inherently a good thing — it’s exactly as good as the principle is.