I don’t imagine you start out dreaming about anchoring local news in Amarillo, Texas or Buffalo, NY or Peoria, Illinois. Nope. If you’re in Texas, you’ve got your eye on Dallas or Houston. If you’re in New York, it’s The Apple. Peoria? Get real. You’re thinking Chicago.
More likely, you’re thinking even bigger: national network or cable news. You want to be Tom Brokaw or Brian Williams (when that was a good thing.) Or have your own hours, like Anderson Cooper or Laura Ingraham (when that was a good thing).
And then you wake up in the TV equivalent of WKRP in Cincinnati. And you’re not Tom Brokaw, you’re Ted Baxter, the bumbling anchor on the weakest pretend station in Minneapolis, WJM, where our Mary – Mary Tyler Moore – worked.
But, hey, there’s something to be said for big fish/small pond. You’re the local news anchor. You’re a big deal in the community. Folks say hello when they see you in line at Kohl’s. They get a kick out of riding next to you in the annual cancer fundraiser. Life’s pretty good.
And then Sinclair – a pretty conservative outfit - scoops up your station, and you may be a bit leery. And you get even leerier when you’re handed a script to read.
If you read the script in a vacuum, it is, of course, fairly anodyne.
Who’s going to argue that “biased and false news” is a good thing? Who’s going to stand up for lies and facts that aren’t facts? Who’s going to defend the spread of lies on social media? Especially when you position it as ‘we don’t like it whether it comes from the right or the left.’ And you wave the flag of “dangerous to our democracy.” Not just any old democracy. Our democracy.
What’s not to agree with? What’s not to like?
But then you insert to word “fake.”
Fake? As in fake news? Hmmmm. Sounds familiar. Why, isn’t that a word that the present overseer of the annual White House Egg Roll uses pretty darned frequently? On social media?
It’s that insertion of “fake” in there that gives the Sinclair intention away. Dog whistle? Nah. Claxon is more like it.
And then the present overseer of the annual White House Egg Roll tweets out support for Sinclair and attacks on the mainstream media. Those fakers.
“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,”
But if you ignore the “fake” in general, and the present overseer of the annual White House Egg Roll in particular, you don’t hear that claxon, and you can pretend that it’s a dog whistle that you just can’t hear. Which means you can go ahead and read the damn thing, with all the fake conviction and Ted Baxter pomposity and seriousness of purpose you can muster up. A job’s a job, and an anchor job – even in Fresno – is a pretty sweet gig. And mostly you’re left alone to focus on local matters, like the fire in the convenience store on Foster and Main, and the teacher who got the kidney donation from her former student.
But it sure looks creepy when you see a mashup of so many of those local anchors. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the Deadspin compilation, via NPR.
And then there’s this:
Sinclair has been accused of using connections in the Trump administration to ease regulations on media consolidation. In an effort to expand its reach, the company is seeking approval from the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission for its $3.9 billion deal to buy Tribune Media. (Source: NY Times)
Oh.
Anyway, I don’t really blame those anchor folks for reading that statement. Orders from headquarters and all that.
Still, it’s bad enough that so many our our citizens still contend that President Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim. Or, worse, a bit I saw that other day – can’t find the exact cite – that showed that a solid chunk of Trump supporters feel he should be allowed to rule as a strong man, unfettered by Congress or the courts. Do we really need those who get their news from local TV having that local TV news reinforcing the belief that anything critical of the president is a biased lie from the pit of hell? Fake news. Fake news.
I think not.
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