Tag Archives: Sinclair Broadcasting

There Is More To The Story

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The firing of Jimmy Kimmel was a shock to some of us. His comedy has often bordered on inappropriate. I have mixed emotions about the Federal Communications Commission being involved in any way, but I have no problem with a private company taking whatever action they deem appropriate in dealing with someone who is part of their brand. However, there seems to be more to the story.

On Thursday, The New York Post reported the following:

Jimmy Kimmel’s comments on the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk weren’t just noxiously offensive and seemingly misleading — their timing was also incredibly bad: They threaten to derail Nexstar’s $6.2 billion takeover of rival broadcaster Tegna, telecom insiders tell On The Money.

The already controversial deal — which would combine two of the nation’s largest owners of local TV stations — poses significant antitrust questions and needs a close review by the Federal Communications Commission and its conservative firebrand chairman, Brendan Carr.

Kimmel’s comments made that approval even dicier. That’s why Nexstar publicly announced Thursday that its stations would no longer carry the show, telecom insiders tell On The Money. Ditto for ABC, which produces and distributes “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” to broadcasters like Nexstar — and likewise has business before the FCC.

Bob Iger, the CEO of its parent, Disney, was also quick to suspend the show indefinitely.

On Thursday, Sinclair Broadcasting — a rival local TV giant with a conservative bent — upped the ante even further, saying ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel was insufficient and announcing it will yank “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” from its stations until the host apologizes directly to Kirk’s family and donates to his political activist group.

The backdrop to all this is Carr, a longtime telecom lawyer who is the new sheriff of the broadcast industry. Carr has been warning networks large and small that he’s taking one of the most expansionary views of the agency’s regulatory edict to make sure programming is in the “public interest,” First Amendment concerns be damned.

Ultimately, the public will be the ones to decide what is acceptable on television. Generally speaking, when viewership drops, shows are cancelled. It is interesting that Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks were made at a time when a business deal was being discussed. I do wonder if he believed what he was saying or if he was simply repeating something he had heard. Either way, it was inappropriate.

When The Shoe Is On The Other Foot

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No person is entirely objective. No honest person claims to be. In the field of journalism, some of the people who claim to be objective are not, and some people simply admit their biases and go on from there. I have no problem with a reporter being biased as long as he is honest about where he is coming from. Tilted journalism occurs on both sides of the aisle. It is, however, interesting to see how far left of center most journalists have moved in the last thirty years. Up until the early 1990’s, there was one point of view being put forward–it began with The New York Times and continued through the three major television networks’ nightly news. When Rush Limbaugh began his national radio show, things began to change–conservative viewpoints were being heard. The monopoly was over. Fox News is actually slightly right of center, but is always being attacked as right wing. Actually CNN is so far left of center that it seems as if the center has moved. We will never have totally centered news–what we actually need is balance. A new network is attempting to bring that balance, and the cries of those in fear of losing their monopoly are getting loud.

Yesterday The New York Post posted an article about Sinclair Broadcasting, a network which forced its news anchors to read a promotional statement on air about fake news. The gist of the statement was that Sinclair was not going to be fake news and was going to endeavor to be fair and objective. The reaction by other media was telling.

The article reports:

Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” said that Sinclair appeared to running “Pravda-style propaganda” that he likened to the old Soviet Union. “So here you have an entire broadcasting system running a propaganda clip.

“People will say, ‘Oh, look at the conservatives reading their scripts,’ [but] it’s actually got nothing to do with conservatives, it’s Trumpian and it does smack of … state-run media for an autocrat,” Scarborough said.

The promo video did have one big booster: Trump tweeted his support.

One Sinclair insider said a news anchor at one station had objected when he read the script and said he felt “uncomfortable.”

Does anyone remember President Obama’s JournoList? On July 25, 2010, The Daily Caller posted an article about the JournoList.

The article reports:

In 2007, when Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein founded Journolist, an online gathering place for several hundred liberal journalists, academics and political activists, he imagined a discussion group that would connect young writers to top sources.

But in the heat of a bitter presidential campaign in 2008, the list’s discussions veered into collusion and coordination at key political moments, documents revealed this week by The Daily Caller show.

In a key episode, Journolist members openly plotted to bury attention on then-candidate Barack Obama’s controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman, for instance, suggested an effective tactic to distract from the issue would be to pick one of Obama’s critics, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

…Yet Journolist’s discussions show an influential left-wing faction of the media participating in a far more intentional sort of liberal bias.

Journolist’s members included dozens of straight-news reporters from major news organizations, including Time, Newsweek, The Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg, Huffington Post, PBS and a large NPR affiliate in California.

Aren’t these some of the same people who are going crazy because Sinclair Broadcasting spoke out against fake news? Seems like the pot calling the kettle black.