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Sinclair, Tribune Close to Merger Deal


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These two highlighted sites/groups are NOT, in any way, shape or form, a news site and/or a source of anything other than propaganda and complete and utter nonsense. I'm all for being informed, but people need to realize when they are being used and fed a bunch of bs.

 

Next you'll tell me the Weekly World News and The Onion aren't legitimate sources of journalism either.

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Is any of the stuff on the last 3 pages of posts related to the thread title at hand? Doesn’t look like it. This thread went off topic way before cna247 made a complaint and everyone (including him) went bananas. You know, some of you other regulars can be a little hypocritical and overbearing at times. I feel like everyone is super sensitive. I actually stayed away from this site for over a year (I did peek in from time to time) because of this type of behavior where everyone’s belittling everyone else. I’m starting to wonder why I returned. Anyway, perhaps we can try to be a little nicer to each other?

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A few thoughts on this issue.

 

The local TV station group, for many people, doesn't exist as a concrete thing.

 

One of my aunts splits her time between Asheville and Orlando. She has something of a leftward lean. She is also in a legacy Sinclair market and watches WLOS — which is actually still worth watching for her because it actually covers news events in western North Carolina.

 

I had to explain to her to be careful of national segments on WLOS's newscasts. I had to explain the difference between ABC and its affiliates.

 

Of the station groups, Sinclair has the most developed national news service in terms of content and heavy use of Sinclair national packages in local newscasts. It is very easy for an average local viewer to see Sinclair national content, like the Terrorism Alert Desk or more standard fare, and associate it with the network (e.g. ABC in the case of WLOS). For a Big Three station operated by Sinclair, this presents some awkward tension. The network probably doesn't appreciate people thinking that there is an association between the Sinclair national package on an ABC affiliate and ABC News itself. (Fox is a different story, of course.) Local stations have been sensitive to these sorts of concerns before, often in the form of Fox affiliates trying desperately to distance themselves from Fox News Channel.

 

In a society wracked with a problem of people feeling isolated, local TV news is in some ways the last bastion of important things. It retains high levels of trust, does not suffer from the politicization image problem of national network news, and connects people to what is geographically and emotionally close to them. At the local news level, the news should never be about political tribes. It should be about communities. Because local TV stations serve fairly defined areas, and especially at the medium-small market sizes, it is very hard to lose sight of that. When things happen to people in local news — accidents, shootings, water rate hikes, apartment fires, you name it — those are your viewers!

 

Harry Jessell of TVNewsCheck was once a believer in editorials in local TV news. But the 2016 election and associated media environment prompted him to reassess his view. He now believes the position of trust that local broadcasters continue to hold bestows on them the responsibility to avoid editorializing and present not just daily news coverage but also in-depth, investigative and franchise reporting. "Crimes, fires, accidents and the five-day forecast are not enough," he put it.

 

Sinclair's "nationalization" of local news is not just a problem of injecting a defined political viewpoint into local TV news, often forbidden territory for explicit opinions. (And something that, when you are a broadcaster with the diversity of stations and markets Sinclair serves, is not suitable for all those markets.) It risks losing the credibility earned by decades of serving local communities and it risks people tuning your newscast and news operation out because they're tired of politics.

 

If local TV news becomes another cable news-esque echo chamber, or people see it as such and tune it out, it poses a threat to the fabric of communities across this country given the poor financial state of other forms of mass communication. Newspapers are folding. Radio stations are teetering on bankruptcy. Digital media has been tough to monetize while maintaining mass reach. Local television is, unlike most of its local media peers, often a viable business still at the right scale.

 

Sinclair is playing with fire and wanting to set local media ablaze with politics. Then again, having been an ill-advised petitioner to deny in one of SBG's station acquisitions, I'm not surprised.

 

***

 

As a postscript, when the KENV saga took place, people mourned the loss of the local news programming that mattered to them in Elko.

 

Comments like this one (even in less exaggerated language), however, suggested they wouldn't consume NBC News itself much, though:

 

It won't be any big loss, other than the loss of local news broadcasts. Otherwise, Nothing But Communists (NBC) doesn't have any programs I care to watch, anyway. The NBC Nightly Fake News from New York is almost as sad as those clowns on the Clinton Nonsense Nitwits (CNN), so no loss there...

 

People associated NBC News, the national news division, with a particular political viewpoint. They did not associate KENV's local programs, or presumably the local and Nevada newscasts from KRNV, with politics (though they often depended on them or other programs to get political information relevant to them).

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