Sinclair Broadcast Group is not as well-known a name in television as Fox News’s News Corp. or CNN’s Turner Broadcasting System, but its reach may rival that of a cable juggernaut.
But a stunning video that showcased its anchors reading required scripts that seemed to parrot one of President Trump’s favorite themes has drawn renewed scrutiny to what critics consider the media conglomerate’s years-long effort to inject conservative-tinged coverage into local markets.
Here are some things you should know about the company and where it operates.
What is Sinclair and why have some people not heard of it before?
Based in suburban Maryland, Sinclair owns and operates local news stations nationwide, in cities such as Bakersfield, Calif.; Amarillo, Tex.; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and Birmingham, Ala., although it does not currently own any stations in New York, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay area or Los Angeles.
Many of the stations it runs are affiliates of other national networks, such as WKEF, an ABC affiliate in Dayton, Ohio, and KOKH, a Fox affiliate in Oklahoma City, and are therefore more widely known by those associations. Sinclair owns or operates 59 Fox affiliates, 41 ABC affiliates, 30 CBS affiliates, 25 NBC affiliates, nine Univision affiliates and others, and it also has its own network, Comet, according to its website.
Its stations are clustered in predominantly conservative areas of the country, according to an analysis of the company’s markets by The Washington Post’s Philip Bump: The broadcast areas of Sinclair stations voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton by a 19-point margin, on average.
Why is Sinclair in the news now?
Interest in Sinclair picked up recently after reports exposed a seemingly Trump-friendly script the company ordered its anchors nationwide to read, lambasting “irresponsible, one-sided” and “fake” news stories.
The one-minute-long script, which appeared to echo Trump’s efforts to attack the reporting he has disagreed with as “fake news,” brought to the fore long-standing critiques about what many view as the company’s rightward tilt.
The fake stories promo, which was first reported by CNN in March, drew wide attention after Deadspin published a video Saturday that layered dozens of the company’s anchors around the country reading the script over one another, creating a visceral portrait of corporate message control.
How America's largest local TV owner turned its news anchors into soldiers in Trump's war on the media: https://t.co/iLVtKRQycL pic.twitter.com/dMdSGellH3
— Deadspin (@Deadspin) March 31, 2018
The video has been viewed more than 7.5 million times since it was published Saturday afternoon. Trump added fuel to the fire by leaping to the network’s defense, writing that “Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke.”
“So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased,” he wrote on Twitter.
Early Tuesday, Trump continued to tweet about Sinclair.
At least one Sinclair-owned station in Wisconsin signaled that it resisted the effort: “WMSN/FOX47 Madison did not air the Sinclair promotional announcement during our 9pm news this weekend,” the station said in a Twitter statement. “Rather, we stayed true to our commitment to provide our Madison area viewers local news, weather and sports of interest to them.”
Sinclair’s promo also renewed fears about the effects of greater consolidation in the news media world. The company, which has expanded the number of stations it owns by nearly threefold since 2010, is hoping to add 42 more stations as part of a potential buyout of Tribune Media, for which it needs federal permission.
Why do critics say that Sinclair is biased?
Sinclair has been spotlighted for injecting right-leaning coverage and commentary on national issues into its local broadcasts since well before its “fake stories” advisory became public, making it unique in the world of broadcast television, which is less encumbered by the partisanship that marks cable networks such as Fox News Channel and MSNBC.
While other station owners typically use “must-run” segments to push station promotions, Sinclair has used required programming to push conservative-leaning stances into its local broadcasts.
“The must-runs look like they are part of the news,” David Twedell, business manager of a local camera workers’ union in Seattle, told The Washington Post. “And they’re clearly not.”
Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump White House official and campaign surrogate who was hired last year as the company’s “chief political analyst,” helms segments that often defend Trump and hammer on other Republican themes.
Epshteyn weighed in on Trump’s much-maligned commission to investigate supposed voter fraud — since disbanded after drawing bipartisan rebukes from many states — by urging states to “do everything within their power to cooperate.” After white nationalist demonstrations in Charlottesville spun into violence last summer, he defended Trump’s infamous “both sides” comment in a news conference, saying that “the president correctly acknowledged that there is hate and violence coming from the left as well.”
Mark Hyman, a former Sinclair executive, also leads a commentary segment that seems at times like a sounding board for the right.
“Listen up closely, snowflake, yes, I’m talking to you, you the social justice warrior who whines for trigger warnings and safe spaces,” he said in one widely cited segment about college campuses. “College isn’t a babysitter service.”
The company’s Terrorism Alert Desk produces segments that underscore the menace of terrorism worldwide. HBO comedy host John Oliver lambasted a news brief from the desk about efforts to ban burkinis in France as part of a critical look at Sinclair last year.
“That is not about terrorism,” Oliver said incredulously. “It’s just about Muslims.”
During the presidential campaign, Sinclair stations gave a disproportionate amount of neutral or favorable coverage to Trump compared with coverage of Clinton, according to internal documents viewed by The Washington Post. Some “must-run” segments about Clinton included those about supposed health issues, as well as her handling of her email server as secretary of state.
Politico reported that White House senior adviser and Trump-son-in-law Jared Kushner had told a group of business executives that Trump’s campaign had an agreement with Sinclair to give it access to Trump on the condition that its interviews be broadcast without commentary.
This kind of coverage dates back years. During the Obama presidency, the station group was criticized for running an infomercial from a Republican-aligned PAC that claimed that Obama may have raised campaign money from the militant group Hamas, as well as a half-hour news segment criticizing Obama for the economy and the attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya, that ran before 2012 election.
In the midst of John F. Kerry’s challenge to President George W. Bush in the 2004 election, the station group was widely criticized for planning to run a documentary called “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal” that cast a negative light on Kerry’s anti-Vietnam War activities. Although it backed off running the documentary in full, it aired parts of it in the days before the election.
Who is it owned by and what are their political views?
The company is owned by the family of founder Julian Sinclair Smith. According to the New York Times, the company’s chairman, Smith’s son, David Smith, and his brothers have given the majority of their political donations to Republican causes.
During the 2016 election cycle, the brothers “donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republican causes, including at least $6,000 from Frederick Smith to a ‘super PAC’ supporting Mr. Trump and $20,000 from David Smith to the National Republican Congressional Committee,” the Times reported.
What are the details of Sinclair’s expansion plans?
The company is awaiting federal approval of a proposed $3.9 billion buyout of Tribune Media, which would add 42 more local television stations to its quiver, including in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.
Current Federal Communications Commission rules limit single station owners from reaching 39 percent of the national television audience and prohibiting ownership of more than two stations in most TV markets. But the FCC under Republican Chairman Ajit Pai — who met with Sinclair executives in the days before he was named chairman — has been in the midst of a strong push for deregulation.
Pai has stated that he favors loosening ownership standards, and the FCC can offer exceptions and waivers to those rules. If the deal is allowed to go through, Sinclair’s stations could reach as many as 70 percent of the households in the country.
What has Sinclair said about the recent controversy?
As The Post’s Paul Farhi reported, Scott Livingston, the company’s vice president of news, wrote in a memo to Sinclair employees Monday that the company’s critics were “upset about our well-researched journalistic initiative focused on fair and objective reporting.” Livingston, Farhi wrote, “emphasized that the campaign was aimed at unsubstantiated claims, such as the notorious ‘Pizzagate‘ conspiracy theory that inspired a shooting at a Washington pizza restaurant; or the one about the pope supposedly endorsing Trump’s candidacy — a ginned-up hoax that spread like wildfire on Facebook in 2016.”
However, the campaign itself didn’t offer such specific examples to viewers. And Livingston, in his memo, didn’t mention stories such as the discredited theory that a Democratic National Committee staff member named Seth Rich was killed as payback for leaking politically embarrassing DNC emails to WikiLeaks. Sinclair’s WJLA pursued the Rich story avidly; it reported last year that an amateur investigative group funded by a GOP lobbyist found that a “hired killer” probably had killed Rich. Police maintain that Rich was killed in a botched robbery.
In a company statement, Sinclair said Monday that the announcements “were responding to the public’s distrust in news generally” and that “the promos served no political agenda, and represented nothing more than an effort to differentiate our award-winning news programming from other, less reliable sources of information.”
“We aren’t sure of the motivation for the criticism, but find it curious that we would be attacked for asking our news people to remind their audiences that unsubstantiated stories exist on social media, which result in an ill-informed public with potentially dangerous consequences,” Livingston said in the statement. “It is ironic that we would be attacked for messages promoting our journalistic initiative for fair and objective reporting, and for specifically asking the public to hold our newsrooms accountable. Our local stations keep our audiences’ trust by staying focused on fact-based reporting and clearly identifying commentary.”
Paul Farhi and Todd C. Frankel contributed to this report, which has been updated.
Read more:
