Category Archives: Random Blogging

And Don’t Forget Sinclair…

Most sentient Americans who follow political news know that Fox “News” is a propaganda arm of the GOP. Fewer people are aware of Sinclair Broadcast Group, which–as Talking Poiints Memo recently reminded us–also pipes disinformation and right-wing partisan talking points through its network of “185 television stations in 86 markets affiliated with all the major broadcast networks.”


This month, Sinclair Broadcast Group has flooded a vast network of local news websites with misleading articles suggesting that President Biden is mentally unfit for office. The articles are based on specious social media posts by the Republican National Committee (RNC), which are then repackaged to resemble news reports. The thinly disguised political attacks are then syndicated to dozens of local news websites owned by Sinclair, where they are given the imprimatur of mainstream media brands, including NBC, ABC, and CBS.

Sounds bad, right? It’s quite a bit worse than that. As Judd points out, the kinds of material Sinclair has been pumping through it local stations are the most rancid of the attacks on Biden’s age and mental fitness. I’m talking about things like Biden “pooping” on stage during the D-Day commemoration, supposedly “freezing” during other public appearances (according to deceptively edited videos), and his slurring or stuttering of words.

This flood of disinformation is nonstop, it’s still often under the radar, and it’s saturating millions of American homes.

While Fox is widely recognized as a source of disinformation, Sinclair has thus far avoided becoming a household name and  identifiably untrustworthy source of information. That’s because the company lacks branding; it owns stations that are affiliated with all three major broadcast networks. When someone tunes in to Sean Hannity, they do so knowing what they’ll get; the disinformation purveyed by Sinclair is far more insidious.

A couple of years ago, the company required its commentators–news anchors on a wide variety of platforms–to read a statement bashing so-called “fake news.” That particular ploy got a fair amount of notice due to the identical language on multiple stations, but much of Sinclair’s propaganda is less obvious.

As the Washington Post reported earlier this year,

Every year, local television news stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting conduct short surveys among viewers to help guide the year’s coverage.

A key question in each poll, according to David Smith, the company’s executive chairman: “What are you most afraid of?”

The answers are evident in Sinclair’s programming. Crime, homelessness, illegal drug use, failing schools and other societal ills have long been core elements of local TV news coverage. But on Sinclair’s growing nationwide roster of stations, the editorial focus reflects Smith’s conservative views and plays on its audience’s fears that America’s cities are falling apart, according to media observers, Smith associates, and current and former staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal company matters.

As the article points out, Sinclair offers its audience “a perspective that aligns with Trump’s oft-stated opinion that America’s cities, especially those run by Democratic politicians, are dangerous and dysfunctional.”
 
“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.”

I have often wondered where friends from suburbia get these incredibly distorted pictures of urban life. At root, it is clearly influenced by the fact that cities–especially their downtowns–are where “those people” live. Apparently, propaganda purveyors like Fox and Sinclair (and their rapidly growing number of clones) understand the power of prejudice and intentionally encourage the racism that motivates a disproportionate percentage of Trump voters.

A Think article written not long after the scandal of the identical “opinion” pieces suggested that Sinclair is a “truer” heir to Roger Ailes than even Fox News.

This April, a reporter for a Sinclair-owned TV station revealed that she was fired for refusing to add conservative talking-points to a climate change story. This followed weeks of controversy, including revelations that the media giant had forced local news anchors to read identical scripts denouncing, in Trump-like fashion, “fake” news.

Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the largest owner of local television stations in America, is still not a household name like, for example, Fox News. Yet it may be the truest heir to former Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes’s original vision of conservative news programming. Long before cable news, Ailes — who died in 2017 — had been dreaming up ways to inject local news programs with a conservative spin.

Here’s a list of the stations Sinclair owns.

And we wonder why Americans don’t know who or what to trust….

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A Disturbing Analysis

This blog consistently attributes many of America’s problems to the unprecedented contours of the information environment we occupy. That critique has tended to focus on the proliferation of online partisan propaganda, but I’ve gradually become even more concerned about the reduced reliability of some of our most mainstream publications.

I previously shared concerns about an anti-Biden bias at the New York Times. The Times–like several other publications–has engaged in the sort of forced equivalency that has led them to jump on the slightest gaffe by Biden while ignoring–indeed, “cleaning up”–Trump’s ever-more-demented word-salads.

Then there’s the Washington Post, where recent shake-ups in management threaten the publication’s long-term viability–and current reliability. A recent Substack letter from Robert Hubbell analyzed the precarious situation at what was once a storied newspaper. The letter began:

On a quiet weekend, I received several emails from readers outraged over a Washington Post editorial scolding Joe Biden and his campaign for “ignoring the polls.” The editorial is titled, “Opinion: Biden should assume the polls are right, not wrong.” The editorial drips with pique provoked by Biden’s violation of the First Commandment of Serious Journalism: “We are the source of truth, and you shall not question our wisdom.” Or, as the Post editorial board put it, “Mr. Biden has attacked not just individual polls but polling writ large.”

As Hubbell noted, the piece relied heavily on a Times-Sienna poll that has been widely discredited.

What is most disturbing about the Post’s finger-wagging is that it occurs as the Post’s legitimacy as a major media outlet is open to question. A more urgent topic for the Post editorial board would have been, “Will the Post survive for another year?”

The questions about the Post’s continuing legitimacy arise because–as the publication is hemorrhaging money– its management has been taken over by alumni of Rupert Murdoch’s British media operations. Hubbell spends considerable time on the troubling backgrounds of those new managers. Then he gets to the root of the problem:

Because it is hard to be a successful media business these days. They have concluded that the profit-maximizing strategy is to “Root against Biden during the campaign and then rage against Trump if he wins.” (To understand that strategy, it is helpful to know that WaPo’s website had 100 million unique visitors in 2020 when Trump was president and 50 million unique visitors in 2023 when Biden was president.)

Is the Post surrendering journalistic ethics to garner tabloid profits?

We live in a world where one of America’s major political parties has decided to put party above country; if Hubbell is correct–and I believe he is–we are now seeing mainline news organizations put profit above professionalism.

Hubbell provides a telling example: WaPo’s recent article about Trump’s appearance at a “Black church” in Detroit.

The article peddles the popular narrative that Trump has taken his case to the Black community, where Biden is (allegedly) losing support:

Black voters have overwhelmingly favored Democrats since the civil rights movement. But recent polls show Trump has made gains with Black men, alarming some Democrats because even a small change in Black turnout or preferences could tip such pivotal states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

Although it sounds like Trump went to a “Black church” to deliver his message to the Black community in Detroit, the event was a PR stunt created for the media—which eagerly participated in the fraud by failing to write the true story, which is this: No one from Detroit’s Black community—or the church’s congregation—showed up to hear Trump!

The reporter clearly understood what was really going on-seventeen paragraphs into the story, he wrote that “No one in line [for the event] identified themselves to a reporter as a member of [the] church.” (He did write In the third paragraph that the audience at the event “was not predominantly Black.”) In fact–as a photo Hubbell helpfully linked to clearly showed, the audience was almost completely White.

The story that the Post’s reporter should have written was this: “Trump holds sham event in Black church with white audience to conceal lack of support among Black voters.” If Biden had pulled the same stunt, that is exactly the type of headline the Post would have run on its front page.

 Hubbell concludes that the major media has lined up against Biden and is rooting for him to lose. “The prophets of doom putting profit ahead of democracy include the Washington Post and the New York Times. We just need to accept that fact and focus on getting likely voters and new voters to turn out.”

Following the money explains a very dangerous turn of events…..

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Parties Versus Cults

A recent essay in the Washington Post considered the inside baseball aspects of party platforms.

“Back in the day,” when politics was far more focused on policy, I participated in local efforts to craft platforms that reflected thoughtful policy positions; as the linked article notes, those days–and their “thoughtful discussions”– are long-gone. As the essay also noted, while candidates sometimes tried to distance themselves from unpopular planks, platforms mattered. They revealed which factions really held power, and testified to the differences between Democrats and Republicans.

That was then. Policy doesn’t matter when politics is all about a cult waging culture war.

Four years ago, having scaled back their convention because of covid-19, the Republicans who nominated Donald Trump to a second term didn’t bother to adopt a platform at all. Instead, the party decided to stick with its 2016 document and “continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.”

The last actual GOP platform contains all sorts of commitments that the the current crazies have abandoned.

That eight-year-old platform is a fossil of primordial, pre-MAGA conservatism — of a day when abortion rights seemed secure enough that posturing against them carried little political cost; when Republicans could agree that Ukraine’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity” needed to be defended against “a resurgent Russia.”

Written before our rogue Supreme Court overturned Roe, the platform pandered to single-issue anti-choice voters with a plank supporting a human life amendment to the Constitution that would make the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth. That’s going to be a bit awkward in a country where something like 70% of voters are pro-choice– and angry about the first-ever retraction of a constitutional right.

So maybe it is time for today’s Republicans to acknowledge the truth. They are no longer a party with any firm principles at all. Enduring and consistent values? Not for them.

Come to think of it, this whole exercise of writing a 2024 platform for the Republican Party could be pretty simple. Why bother with putting together another 60-page document when the truth about today’s GOP can be summed up in a single sentence?

“RESOLVED, That the Republican Party stands for whatever the hell Donald Trump says it does.”

Robert Hubbell recently reminded us just “what the hell” Trump has said lately.

Trump has promised to deny funds to any school that requires mandatory vaccines. Childhood vaccines against 16 diseases have saved hundreds of thousands of lives over the last century. Defunding schools that require vaccines will cause outbreaks of diseases that have been effectively eliminated. See HuffPo, Trump Makes Bizarre Threat About Schools And Vaccine Mandates.

Trump says that business leaders who do not support him should be fired. NBC News, Trump says business executives should be ‘fired for incompetence’ if they don’t support him.

Trump trashed Fox News for having the temerity to interview a guest—former Speaker Paul Ryan—who was critical of the former president. Trump said, “Nobody can ever trust Fox News, and I am one of them.” MSN, Trump Loses It At Fox News, Says No One Can Trust It.

Trump said that President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plans are “stunts” that will be “rebuked” if Trump is elected. See The Independent, Trump calls Biden’s student loan forgiveness a ‘vile’ publicity stunt.

Trump recently told the Danbury Institute that, if elected, “These are going to be your years because you’re going to make a comeback like just about no other group . . . And I’ll be with you side by side.” The Danbury Institute promotes fetal personhood, opposing abortion from “the moment of conception” (a position that would effectively ban IVF). See Missouri Independent, Trump says he’ll work ‘side by side’ with group that wants abortion ‘eradicated.

Granted, Trump says whatever he thinks a given audience wants to hear–his lack of any comprehensive policy commitment (or understanding of what policy is or how government operates) is one reason his initial term did less damage than it might otherwise have done. Should he win in November, he’ll have the far greater competence of Project 2025 authors to draw on.

David Sedaris said it best. Anyone who thinks there is any equivalence between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is like the airline passenger in his often-cited example:

The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

To vote for Donald Trump–or the Indiana GOP’s Christian Taliban–is to reject the chicken.

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You Are What You Read…

Remember when nutritionists admonished us with the phrase “you are what you eat”? A recent report from Harvard’s Kennedy school has modernized it, warning that–in our era of pervasive propaganda and misinformation–we are what we read (or otherwise access).

The study explored the media consumption of participants, and the degree to which the unreliability of that media left them with inaccurate beliefs about COVID-19 and vaccination. The researchers found that “the average bias and reliability of participants’ media consumption are significant predictors of their perceptions of false claims about COVID-19 and vaccination.”

I know–your first thought was “duh.” Did we really need a study showing that people who depend on garbage media believe ridiculous things? Wouldn’t logic tell us that?

Still, what seems self-evident can often prove less than conclusive, so confirmation of that logic in a rigorous study is important. In addition, the study confirmed politically-relevant differences in media consumption and credulity between Republicans and Democrats.

Here’s their summary of the study:

  • We surveyed 3,276 U.S. adults, applying Ad Fontes Media’s (2023) ratings of media bias and reliability to measure these facets of participants’ preferred news sources. We also probed their perceptions of inaccurate claims about COVID-19 and vaccination.
  • We found participants who tend to vote for Democrats—on average—consume less biased and more reliable media than those who tend to vote for Republicans. We found these (left-leaning) participants’ media reliability moderates the relationship between their media’s bias and their degree of holding false beliefs about COVID-19 and vaccination.
  • Unlike left-leaning media consumers, right-leaning media consumers’ misinformed beliefs seem largely unaffected by their news sources’ degree of (un)reliability. 
  • This study introduces and investigates a novel means of measuring participants’ selected news sources: employing Ad Fontes’s (2023) media bias and media reliability ratings. It also suggests the topic of COVID-19, among many other scientific fields of recent decades, has fallen prey to the twin risks of a politicized science communication environment and accompanying group-identity-aligned stances so often operating in the polarized present. 

The researchers found that the news-seeking and news-avoiding behaviors of the participants confirmed “the longstanding concern that those who embrace—and subsequently seek out—misinformation, even if inadvertently, constitute a group at risk of endangering their own and others’ health.”

In a country sharply divided along partisan lines, the implications rather obviously go further.

As any student of history–especially the history of journalism–can attest, America has always produced biased sources of information. What is different now, thanks to the Internet and social media, is its ubiquity–and greatly increased political motivation to seek out confirmatory “information.”

Other studies tell us that people who want to believe X do not necessarily change their belief in X when confronted with evidence that X is inaccurate. The Harvard study found that anti-vaccine attitudes were “tenacious and challenging to counter, unyielding to evidence, and bolstered by persuasive anti-vaccine messaging—which is not difficult to find and immerse oneself in. In the COVID-19 context, several identity groups appear to have engaged in this immersion.”

Some research has suggested that confrontation with contrary facts can lead to what is called a “backfire effect,” causing people to double down and become even more stubborn in their original beliefs. (Facebook found, for example, that warning users that an article was false caused people to share that article even more.) Other research has suggested that fact-checking, if done properly, can often successfully correct misperceptions. But…

First, facts and scientific evidence are not the most powerful and easy way to encourage people to abandon false or inaccurate beliefs and perspectives. Second, people embrace fake news, misinformation and disinformation because of their beliefs, even if they can be proven wrong, exercising, in many cases, a demonstration of tribal loyalty. Third, engaging in a dialogue in a non-threatening manner to avoid defense mechanisms from activating with personal stories has a greater likelihood of success.

Even when encounters with the facts might actually cause a reconsideration, it turns out that the algorithms used by social media platforms increasingly shield users from information they might find uncongenial. Those “likes” we register act as guidelines used to feed us more of the posts we’ll “like,” and shield us from contrary perspectives or facts that might debunk our preferred prejudices.

And now, the deepfakes are coming.

On the one hand, several sites are available that evaluate the credibility of the sources we consult. On the other hand, no one can force people to visit those sites or believe their ratings.

it has never been easier to avoid uncongenial realities and evade critical thinking…..

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The “Clean Hands” Posturers

As political campaigns proceed toward November, I become more and more terrified. It isn’t simply at the Presidential level–although the prospect of giving a stark raving lunatic access to the nuclear codes does, among other things, keep me up at night. Even a superficial acquaintance with the antics of the MAGA know-nothings in Congress and their peers in Red state legislatures is incredibly depressing.

November will tell the tale. Will sensible Americans reject the party of out-and-proud theocrats and culture warriors running for state and federal offices? Here in Indiana, the GOP–in thrall to the lunatic– is running candidates for state office who would have been unthinkable even to the right wing of the party just a few years ago.

It’s not just Beckwith.

Lots of sensible Hoosiers will never learn of the outrageous positions held by Braun, Banks and Rokita, thanks to our current information environment. And some segment–small, but arguably important–will adopt what Tom Nichols has accurately dubbed the “Clean Hands” posture. These are the “holier than thou” voters who recognize that Trump is completely unfit for office and will not vote for him—yet will not vote to stop him.

Bill Barr comes to mind, as does Nikki Haley. Barr is a true believer, and Haley is a shallow opportunist, but both are pillars of courage next to Republicans such as Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, and John Bolton, the supposed guardians of the guardrails who have made the case against Trump but have also vowed not to vote for either Trump or Joe Biden. (Bolton has said that he will write in Dick Cheney.) Even former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a more moderate Republican now running for a Senate seat, has said that he will write in a “symbolic vote that states my dissatisfaction with where the party is.”

It isn’t simply these political insiders who are posturing about the “morality” of their votes. As Nichols notes,

I am aware of all the arguments people make in favor of protest votes, and about how no one should have to mark the box for a candidate they don’t like. In a normal political year, I might even buy some of them. If you genuinely think that Trump and Biden are exact political isomers of each other—symmetrical in their badness and differing only in style—then not voting for either of them makes sense at least in theory, because you are in effect saying that you don’t think anything will really change either way.

But anyone with even half a brain knows that–between Biden and Trump–there is zero equivalence.

Biden is a typical (and relatively moderate center-left) American president, and the Jimmy Clean Hands Republicans know that outside MAGA world, they would sound pusillanimous if they started mumbling about egg prices and diversity training programs while Trump is threatening to attack the Constitution, release insurrectionists from prison, and use the government to get revenge on his personal enemies.

In the end, the Clean Hands position encourages people to think that their vote really does not matter, other than as a solipsistic expression of personal dissatisfaction. It indulges the narcissistic fantasy that on Election Day, a town crier will say, “1 million votes for Biden, 1 million and one votes for Trump, and one admirable vote for Ronald Reagan. We all want to thank you for your deeply principled stand. And it’s not your fault that Trump won the state.”

As Nichols reminds us, the reality is that only one of these men will emerge with the codes to the U.S. nuclear arsenal. And he ends with a statement that every one of us ought to take seriously:

Personally, I vote as if my vote is the deciding ballot. I know it isn’t, of course, but it focuses my mind and makes me take the civic duty of voting seriously. People have given their lives for my right to stand in that booth, and when American democracy is facing a clear and existential threat, their sacrifice deserves something more than the selfish calculations of the Jimmy Clean Hands caucus.

No sane voter thinks that Jill Stein or JFK, Jr. is going to win the Presidency. A vote for one of the “spoiler” candidates is a mark of moral cowardice–a refusal to acknowledge that no candidate, of either party, is faultless–or even close– and that our duty as citizens is not to clutch our pearls and posture, but to choose between the alternatives genuinely on offer.

And anyone who thinks Joe Biden and Donald Trump are remotely close to equivalent ought to see a psychiatrist.

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