Propaganda Pretending to be News
A decade ago, when the right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting Network, the stealth twin of the Fox News-Murdoch empire, bought up widely trusted news stations like KOMO in Seattle and Portland’s KATU, journalistic watch dogs cried foul.
Since KOMO’s purchase, it has degraded into a full-on Fox News equivalent, but with the deceptive imprimatur of a trusted name like ABC News.
Unfortunately, people tend to think they are just watching a local ABC news affiliate, and don’t realize they are actually watching a broadcast whose scripts are often dictated by a Trump aligned big business.
As CNBC pointed out:
But while the bias of networks like Fox News or MSNBC is well-known, local stations are much less likely to be considered left or right. Which makes must-runs themselves incredibly dangerous, because they're coming out of the mouths of news anchors viewers know and trust, those they could very well run into at the supermarket or PTA meetings.
False Reporting About Biden
The latest KOMO and Sinclair’s long line of propaganda pieces are focused on deluding voters into thinking President Biden’s age is manifesting in ways that it manifestly is not.
From conjuring up Biden “freezes” to using deceptively edited video to suggest Biden slurred his speech, to pretending Biden soiled himself during D-Day celebrations, and otherwise parroting Trump campaign talking points, KOMO and its partners have completely abandoned basic journalistic integrity in favor of false stories to help elect Trump and other ethno-nationalist candidates.
It turns out that many of their recent propagandistic headlines were written by Jackson Walker, who is months out of college and freshly off his previous gig writing for an right-wing college student publication.
This same guy retweeted a message that suggested LGTBQ people are part of a “child mutilation cult.”
Walter Cronkite, he isn’t.
What To Do
First, don’t buy their hype. There is plenty to like and plenty to criticize about the current President or various political leaders. Better to turn to real information sources or trenchant analysts when working out your perspective on this.
Note that a 2019 study from Stanford and Emory Universities “showed that a Sinclair acquisition of local stations resulted in . . . “a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage.” No need to bother with an intellectually bereft, dishonest, and slanted publication.
Second, ignore their localized drivel, which floods the airways with straightforwardly misleading crime and homelessness scare tactics, like the oft-panned Seattle is Dying “documentary.” Watch out for the ways in which this ends up making conservative candidate look “centrist.”
In fact, there is nothing moderate or centrist about their perspective at all.
Sinclair stations deliver messages that appeal to older, White, suburban audiences, and they play up crime stories in a way that is disproportionate to their statistical presence,” said Anne Nelson, a journalist and author of “Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. “All of it is fearmongering and feeds into a racialized view of cities.”
Third: tell your friends! People who aren’t already down the right-wing rabbit hole need to know who these people really are and what their agenda is. Get them to stop watching KOMO, KATU, and or whatever other outlet in your area has been compromised by Sinclair News.