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The Election Circus Begins
“Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money.”
Jan 07, 2019
It is January 2019. This signals the start of the 2020 election circus. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the first big-name Democrat on stage. But we will soon be deluged with candidates, bizarre antics and endless commentary by fatuous TV and radio pundits. The hyperventilating, the constant polling, the updates on who has the largest campaign war chest, the hypothetical matches between this hopeful and that hopeful, the mocking tweets by Donald Trump, will, as we saw in the 2016 election campaign, have as much relevance to our lives and political future as the speculation on cable sports channels about next year's football season. This farce takes the place of genuine political life.
It costs a lot of money to mount this spectacle. Our corporate masters, like the oligarchic rulers of ancient Rome who poured money into the arena as they stripped the empire and its citizens of their assets, are happy to oblige. The campaign sustains the fiction of a democracy and gives legitimacy to the corporate state. Maybe Hillary Clinton, who raised $1 billion in her 2016 run for president, will return for another season, although the Bill and Hillary tour is now a debacle with empty seats and slashed ticket prices. Maybe Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders will make comebacks. And what about the new faces in the scramble for the presidency--Beto O'Rourke, former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and the billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg?
It is a political version of the reality television show "Survivor." Who will be the first knocked out? Who will make it into the semifinals and the finals? Who is the most devious and cunning? Who will come out on top? We get to vote for the contestants that appeal to us most, or at least vote against those we hate the most. The cable news shows, in a prelude to the nonstop idiocy to come, have spent the last few days speculating about whom Mitt Romney will endorse in the 2020 race. Now, there's a burning question of national importance.
The "experts" and well-groomed pundits on their screens who sold them the con that deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, bailing out the banks, nearly two decades of constant war, the exporting of jobs overseas, tax cuts for the rich and the impoverishment of the working class were forms of progress.
To take power in 2021 in lieu of any real policy changes, the Democratic Party is banking on the deep animus toward President Trump. It has no intention of instituting genuine populist programs, rebuilding unions, funding universal health care, providing free college tuition or curbing the criminal activities of the corporations and the big banks. The war machine will continue to wage endless war and consume half of all discretionary spending. The vaunted new populist members of Congress will be no more than window dressing, trotted out, like Sanders, to trick voters into thinking the Democratic Party is capable of reform. Most voters, for this reason, are "voting out of loathing, against enemies and against the system in general, not really for anybody," as journalist Matt Taibbi points out.
Working men and women especially despise the slick-talking politicians--including the Clintons and Barack Obama--and the "experts" and well-groomed pundits on their screens who sold them the con that deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, bailing out the banks, nearly two decades of constant war, the exporting of jobs overseas, tax cuts for the rich and the impoverishment of the working class were forms of progress. Trump hangs on to the support of white working Americans because he expresses through his adolescent insults and dynamiting of political norms the legitimate hatred they feel toward the well-heeled, college-educated ruling elites who sold them out. The Democrats, at the same time, understand that it takes someone as revolting as Trump to fire up their lethargic base, a group in which millions do not vote. They cling to a tactic of "anybody but Trump" even though it did not work in 2016.
The corporate media ignores issues and policies, since there is little genuine disagreement among the candidates, and presents the race as a beauty contest.
The corporate media ignores issues and policies, since there is little genuine disagreement among the candidates, and presents the race as a beauty contest. The fundamental question the press asks is not what do the candidates stand for but whom do the voters like. As for now, Warren--the only nationally known Democrat except Julian Castro to form an exploratory committee for a presidential bid--is not winning this popularity contest. A CNN/Des Moines Register Iowa poll--yes, polling in Iowa already has begun--puts her fourth, with only 8 percent of support among the Democrats surveyed, behind Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Beto O'Rourke.
Our corporate rulers do not need to denounce democracy. Democratic laws, such as who can fund campaigns, have been subverted from within, their original purposes redefined by the courts and legislative bodies to serve corporate power. This managed democracy has transformed elections from the simple, straightforward process of voting for a party platform or party positions to vast, choreographed theatrical productions. Politicians run on "moral" issues and use public relations experts to create manufactured personalities. Trump, his image constructed by a reality television show, proved more adept than his rivals at playing this game the last time around.
Politicians must stick to the script. They have well-defined roles. They express a suffocating, reality-defying positivism about the future of America. They are steadfast in their obsequious praise of the nation's "heroes" in the military and law enforcement. They are silent about the crimes of empire. They ignore the plight of the poor; indeed the word "poor" is banished from their vocabulary. They pretend we do not live in a corporate oligarchy, although they acknowledge amorphous attacks on the middle class and promise to stem the assault. They exude a cloying feel-your-pain compassion that revolves around personal stories of the hardships they overcame in their own lives to become "successes"--the most ludicrous being Trump's claim that he turned a "very small" loan from his father into a multibillion-dollar real estate empire. They telegraph to us that they are one of us. We can be like them. They trot out their wives, husbands and children, even when a spouse like Melania Trump looks as if she has been taken hostage, to portray themselves as family men and women. They claim they are outsiders, ignoring their long political careers and their status as members of the wealthy ruling elite. They are no different from the array of self-help gurus who ignore systemic injustice and social decay to peddle schemes for personal success. The formula is universal. It is the triumph of artifice, what Benjamin DeMott called "junk politics."
Voters have little or no say in who decides to run, who gets funded, how campaigns are managed, what television ads say, which candidates get covered by the press or who gets invited to presidential debates. They are spectators, pawns used to legitimize political farce.
Those who do not play this game, like Ralph Nader, or who like Sanders play it begrudgingly--Sanders refused corporate money, has called for reforming "the bloated and wasteful $716 billion annual Pentagon budget" and addresses issues of class--are ridiculed and marginalized by a monochromatic corporate media that banishes qualification, ambiguity, nuance and genuine dialogue. Trump's success as a candidate came, in large part, because of the constant media attention he received. Those like Sanders who attempt to defy the rules of the game are punished. The goal is entertainment. Politicians who are good entertainers do well. The poor entertainers do badly. The networks seek to attract viewers and increase profits, not disseminate information about political issues. Voters have little or no say in who decides to run, who gets funded, how campaigns are managed, what television ads say, which candidates get covered by the press or who gets invited to presidential debates. They are spectators, pawns used to legitimize political farce.
"At issue is more than crude bribery," the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin writes in "Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Spector of Inverted Totalitarianism." "Campaign contributions are a vital tool of political management. They create a pecking order that calibrates, in strictly quantitative and objective terms, whose interests have priority. The amount of corruption that regularly takes place before elections means that corruption is not an anomaly but an essential element in the functioning of managed democracy. The entrenched system of bribery and corruption involves no physical violence, no brown-shirted storm troopers, no coercion of the political opposition. While the tactics are not those of the Nazis, the end result is the inverted equivalent. Opposition has not been liquidated but rendered feckless."
This process, Wolin writes, has turned the electorate into "a hybrid creation, part cinematic and part consumer. Like a movie or TV audience, it would be credulous, nurtured on the unreality of images on the screen, the impossible feats and situations depicted, or the promise of personal transformation by a new product. In this the elites were abetted by the long-standing American tradition of dramatic evangelism and its fostering of collective fervor and popular fantasies of the miraculous. It was no leap of faith from the camp meetings of the nineteenth century and the Billy Sundays of the twentieth century to the politically savvy televangelist of the twenty-first century."
The corporations that own the media and the two major political parties have a vested interest in making sure there is never serious public discussion about issues ranging from our disastrous for-profit health care system and endless wars to the virtual tax boycott that large corporations have legalized.
The corporations that own the media and the two major political parties have a vested interest in making sure there is never serious public discussion about issues ranging from our disastrous for-profit health care system and endless wars to the virtual tax boycott that large corporations have legalized. The corporate system is presented as sacrosanct and the ruling ideology of neoliberalism as natural law. The corporations are funding the show. They get what they pay for.
Sanders, it appears, will run again as a Democrat, despite the theft of the 2016 nomination by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party hierarchy. His next campaign, to quote Samuel Johnson, will be the triumph of hope over experience. The Democratic establishment and the media sharks will, if Sanders uses the old playbook, devour him. They have already severely diminished his stature by turning him into Clinton and Chuck Schumer's barking seal.
The differences between the right-wing media and the liberal media are minuscule. As Taibbi writes in "Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus," they are "really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism. The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist. Both companies offer the same service, it's just that the Fox version is a little kinkier."
"Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they're about money," Taibbi writes. "The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates' charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching banks, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, anti-trust waivers and dozens of other things."
Trump is the epitome of the human mutation produced by an illiterate, dumbed-down age of electronic images.
"They mostly don't care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It's about the money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don't have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants down or Mexican babies at an emergency room."
The Republican strategy of playing to the lowest common denominator ensured that eventually the useful idiots would take over and elect one of their own, in Donald Trump. Trump is the epitome of the human mutation produced by an illiterate, dumbed-down age of electronic images. He, like tens of millions of other Americans, believes anything he sees on television. He does not read. He is consumed by vanity and the cult of the self. He is a conspiracy theorist. He blames America's complex social and economic ills on scapegoats such as Mexican immigrants and Muslims, and of course the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, in turn, blames Trump's election on Russia and former FBI Director James Comey. It is the theater of the absurd.
The childish gibberish Trump speaks is the new language of political discourse. His taunting tweets against his enemies are countered by his enemies with taunting tweets against him. These grade-school-level insults dominate the daily news cycle. The political process, captured by commercial interests, devolved to Trump's imbecilic level. The presidential election of 2020 has begun. The circus, with its freaks, con artists and clowns, is open for business.
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The Right-Wing Firestorm That Rages On
A new documentary reveals how the right-wing attack on the national, grassroots anti-poverty group ACORN was a dress rehearsal for our current toxic political culture.
Jul 29, 2018
"We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with ACORN," said Senator John McCain in his third presidential debate with Barack Obama in October 2008. ACORN, he said, "is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."
By early 2010, ACORN had closed its doors, a victim of an orchestrated assault by right-wing media and politicians, as well as some self-inflicted wounds.
Obama had briefly worked with ACORN on voter registration drives when he practiced civil rights law in Chicago. The group's leaders believed that, once Obama was in the White House, ACORN would become an even more influential group. But they hadn't anticipated the fusion of right-wing forces that brought ACORN down.
Had ACORN still been around in 2016, it might have prevented a real threat to democracy--Donald Trump--from becoming president. ACORN had developed a finely honed grassroots approach to registering voters and getting them to the polls. By putting its operation to work in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan--where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by only 77,000 votes to win the Electoral College--ACORN might have changed the outcome.
In their recent documentary ACORN and the Firestorm, Reuben Atlas and Sam Pollard not only reveal how the mighty ACORN fell but also show how the attack on ACORN was a dress rehearsal for our current toxic political culture, including the rise of Donald Trump and the alt-right.
Through archival clips and interviews with ACORN staffers, leaders and members, friendly and hostile politicians, and political analysts, the film recounts the group's history, starting with its founding in Arkansas in 1970 by Wade Rathke, a charismatic and brazen young organizer.
In addition to registering millions of voters, ACORN assisted the working poor to buy homes and avoid foreclosure, challenged banks' racist and predatory lending practices, stopped companies from spewing cancer-causing pollution in low-income neighborhoods, got local governments to fix up abandoned buildings that had become havens for crime, and fought for fair treatment by employers, landlords, insurance companies, and government. ACORN led the campaign to get Congress to strengthen the anti-redlining Community Reinvestment Act. It organized the victims of Hurricane Katrina to gain a voice in the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast. It spearheaded the living-wage movement in more than 100 cities and helped make the federal Earned Income Tax Credit an effective anti-poverty program.
By 2008, ACORN had more than 1,000 staffers and 400,000 dues-paying members, recruited by door-to-door canvassers, with chapters in 110 cities in forty states, making it the largest grassroots anti-poverty organization in the country. In the film, we see ACORN members engaged in protests, civil disobedience, lobbying, voter registration, and meetings with politicians.
Unlike many liberal do-gooders, ACORN didn't assume it knew what poor people wanted or needed. Maude Hurd, an ACORN leader from Boston, recalled her first encounter with an organizer. "People always knocking on my door telling me what the problems were," she said. "ACORN was different. When they knocked on my door, they asked me."
In the film's opening scene, we meet a burly bearded white man named Tavis, who looks like a character in Duck Dynasty and who has a Confederate flag folded across some chairs in the front yard of his house in rural Florida. ("Heritage not hate," he explains. "I don't fly it because I don't want to make nobody mad.") He says he voted for Reagan and Bush, but he swears loyalty to ACORN for helping him save his house from foreclosure after his wife lost her job and they got behind on their mortgage payments.
"The idea of ACORN is to stand up for the oppressed, the poor, the people who were taken advantage of," he explains.
For years, banks, the restaurant and other low-wage industries, and other business groups attacked ACORN, but in the early 2000s they were joined by the Republican establishment and the burgeoning right-wing media. ACORN was unprepared for the onslaught.
When McCain attacked ACORN on national TV in his debate with Obama, ACORN leader Bertha Lewis was thrilled "just to hear our names mentioned," she says in the documentary. "I thought it was great. Well, little did I know. Forty years of work called into question by one little video."
That "one little video"--actually, several videos--was made by two amateur activists, twenty-five-year old James O'Keefe and twenty-year old Hannah Giles, who met via Facebook. Their project was promoted by a little-known right-wing agitator named Andrew Breitbart.
As the documentary describes, O'Keefe and Giles took their undercover hidden camera into at least a half-dozen ACORN offices around the country and sought to lure staffers into agreeing to commit illegal acts. In one office, Giles (dressed up in a bizarre costume and claiming to be a prostitute) and O'Keefe (pretending to be her boyfriend) ask for ACORN's help to buy a house to operate a prostitution business with young girls smuggled from Central America. Whether the ACORN staffers believed the two provocateurs, or just played along with the charade, isn't clear. ACORN and the Firestorm allows the audience to decide for themselves what happened.
But what actually happened didn't matter because their sting operation worked. What most Americans remember about ACORN is what Breitbart wanted them to believe. With his help, O'Keefe and Giles doctored the videos to make ACORN look guilty. For example, as Breitbart was releasing the videos to the media, O'Keefe wore a pimp costume in an interview on Fox News. The show's host said that he was "dressed exactly in the same outfit he wore to these ACORN offices." That was a lie. He wore regular clothes when visiting the ACORN offices, but spliced into the videos scenes of him in the pimp outfit.
Breitbart turned what might have been dismissed as a college-age prank into a national controversy. He orchestrated a sophisticated internet campaign, employing an army of bloggers to keep the misinformation in the news. Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and other conservative media played and discussed the videos night after night, repeating the same anti-ACORN (and anti-Obama) talking points. In the film, we see a collage of conservative media commentators describing ACORN as a "criminal enterprise" and "a socialist outfit," and declaring "Obama is ACORN."
The mainstream media, including the New York Times, CNN, NPR, and even Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, soon picked up on the manufactured controversy and, without fact-checking, acted like a transmission belt for the anti-ACORN allegations. In doing so, they gave Breitbart a louder megaphone and turned him into a conservative cult hero.
ACORN's successful voter registration drives, especially in swing states, had been a nightmare for GOP campaign strategists. Republican governors, state attorneys general, and senior Bush administration officials alike led a fruitless pursuit for incidents of voter fraud by ACORN. In 2004 Karl Rove (President George W. Bush's top political adviser) told several U.S. attorneys to prosecute ACORN for voter fraud. One of them--David Iglesias, the Republican U.S. attorney in New Mexico--refused after finding no evidence of fraud, and was ultimately dismissed. Some local Republican officials nevertheless filed bogus lawsuits, accusing ACORN of voter fraud.
Most Americans had never heard of ACORN until McCain (and Sarah Palin) began attacking the group on the campaign trail. By October 2008, 45 percent of Americans believed ACORN was trying to register people to vote multiple times in violation of election laws. A November 2009 survey found that 52 percent of Republicans believed ACORN had stolen the election for Obama. By linking the group to President Obama, conservatives sought to undermine him and his liberal agenda.
Months after ACORN's demise, the group was exonerated from any wrongdoing by every official and independent investigation that looked into O'Keefe and Giles' accusations, including one by California's attorney general and two federal investigations. But by then it was too late.
As the film shows, ACORN leaders were surprised by the failure of most Democrats and liberal organizations to come to its aid when it was under attack. Many liberal foundations--cautious by nature--dropped ACORN like a hot potato. Even nine months after Obama took office, in an interview with ABC, George Stephanopoulos felt compelled to ask him if he favored cutting off federal funds to ACORN.
These two award-winning directors--Atlas's previous documentaries include Brothers Hypnotic and Sour Grapes; Pollard, who was Spike Lee's longtime editor, has also directed August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand, Two Trains Runnin', and Sammy Davis, Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me--have produced an invaluable teaching tool about grassroots organizing, the role of media in politics, and the ongoing battle for the soul of America.
As the film suggests, Trump's attacks on the mainstream media for "fake news," his embrace of the right-wing echo chamber, his racism and attacks the poor and vulnerable, and his claims of widespread "voter fraud" draw on the right's campaign against ACORN a decade ago.
Soon after the 2016 election, Trump claimed that massive "voter fraud" was responsible for his losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes. We can expect the GOP to continue its efforts to reduce turnout among poor, minority and younger voters (who, when they vote, tend to support Democratic candidates) during the current election season and in 2020 elections, justifying its actions by perpetuating the myth of widespread "voter fraud." The film reminds us that voter suppression is nothing new for the Republican Party.
The film reveals other parallels between the attack on ACORN and the rise of Trump. After Breitbart died of a heart attack at forty-three in March 2012, a little-known ex-Wall Street banker named Steve Bannon succeeded him as the head of Breitbart News. He turned it into an arm of the 2016 Trump campaign, served as Trump's campaign manager, spent several months inside the White House, and continues to be the president's ally.
With funding from wealthy conservatives for the misnamed Project Veritas, O'Keefe is still plying his sting operation, which he's used against Planned Parenthood, teachers unions, NPR, and Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Atlas and Pollard gained Giles' trust and sought to tell the story of ACORN's demise through her eyes as well as those of her nemesis, Bertha Lewis. The film depicts Giles as an idealistic but naive conservative trying to make sense of the country's political tensions.
"You know, I was a kid," she says in the film, "Just wanted to have some fun." But she admits that the hit job was her idea.
"Andrew Breitbart and I were instant friends," Giles recalled. "Andrew knew and understood the media, and we [she and O'Keefe] had no media smarts whatsoever."
Lewis grew up in a poor family in Philadelphia. After college she worked in the theater business in New York but spent much of her spare time organizing her neighbors against slum landlords and drug dealers. A friend suggested she contact ACORN, telling her "they're looking for organizers." "They pay you for fighting?" Lewis asked.
She joined ACORN in 1995, quickly rose up the ranks, and became an influential player in New York City politics. In 2008 the ACORN board fired founder and top staffer Rathke (who had covered up an embezzlement scheme by his brother, the group's financial director) and replaced him with Lewis.
She believed that, by adding more financial controls and better staff training, ACORN could weather the storm. She went on TV and radio shows to defend ACORN and appealed to foundations to keep their grants coming, but she couldn't staunch the bleeding.
After ACORN folded, some local leaders regrouped and started new independent organizations--such as the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and New York Communities for Change--that have drawn on ACORN's organizing strengths but avoided its management problems. Lewis founded the Black Institute, a think tank on racial issues.
The filmmakers orchestrated a meeting of the two protagonists, Giles and Lewis, seven years after the videos went viral and brought ACORN down--on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., no less.
"So Hannah. This is quite bizarre for me. It must be bizarre for you too, right?" Lewis says.
Giles tells Lewis that she's become so disillusioned with politics that she's retired from activism and doesn't even bother to vote. But her Facebook page reveals that she (along with her husband) is still involved in using videos to expose alleged corruption among liberal groups by recruiting young conservatives to "follow in her footsteps" through a group she founded, the American Phoenix Foundation. Her Facebook handle is @hannahgiles.acorn.
She remains unapologetic about her work with O'Keefe and Breitbart to bring ACORN down. "The idea of helping low-income families is noble," she says, but she still believes that ACORN was corrupted by "power and money." "That makes me sad," Lewis tells her.
Giles and Lewis were talking past each other. They were involved in a political drama that, the film makes clear, was larger than both of them.
ACORN and the Firestorm--inspired by John Atlas's book, Seeds of Change--reminds us that America's current polarization wasn't inevitable. It was manufactured, a product of the web of big business, conservative media entrepreneurs, and right-wing politicians that led to Trump and his efforts to challenge science, the press, civil liberties, and public policy based on evidence.
ACORN was an early victim of that firestorm, but it continues to spread, damaging our democracy.
Originally published in Dissent Magazine.
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There's Fake News on Your Television, Too
Sinclair Broadcast Group is a hard-right corporation that imposes its views on the local television stations it owns.
Mar 21, 2018
There is increasing public concern about the political manipulation of Facebook and Twitter by private corporations and foreign actors, and it's certainly warranted. Social media, especially Facebook, are increasingly mediating their users' realities in ways that traditional broadcasters can only dream about. But millions of Americans still rely on television news, and they probably give it more credence than they do to random strangers on the internet.
That's bad news, because there's fake news on your television, too. And there's about to be more of it, unless something is done to stop an upcoming merger.
Fake News Network
Sinclair Broadcast Group is a hard-right - perhaps even "alt-right" - corporation that imposes its views on the local television stations it owns. It is closely allied with Donald Trump, whose administration has loosened the rules governing media conglomerates like Sinclair.
Sinclair is privately held by the descendants of Julian Sinclair Smith, who started the network of 193 stations at Baltimore's WBFF in 1971. Smith's son, David, who was the CEO until last year, apparently shares more with Trump than just his politics. Smith was arrested for the solicitation of prostitution in 2004, and reportedly forced reporters at a Sinclair station to do some of his court-ordered community service work.
(Reasonable people may differ about Smith's morality or hypocrisy. But there can be little disagreement that his offense, which took place in a Sinclair company car as it proceeded down Baltimore's Jones Falls Expressway, displayed an indifferent attitude toward both public safety and the proper operation of a motor vehicle.)
The Smith family's political opinions aren't a cause for public concern, and neither are its personal peccadilloes. But the consolidation of media into a few private hands poses great risk, and Sinclair's behavior proves it. Sinclair is abusing its power by distorting the facts to impose a predetermined view of reality on reporters at its 173 stations -- and therefore on the public.
And now, thanks to a ruling from Trump's FCC majority that benefits a Trump ally, Sinclair is poised to impose its distorted worldview on many more markets around the country. Sinclair is proposing to purchase another conglomerate, Tribune Media, in a $3.9 billion deal. It would gain 49 stations, and would sell its stations in New York and Chicago to meet station ownership limits, for a total of 220 television outlets.
In 1983, 90 percent of American media was controlled by 50 companies. Forty years later, 90 percent of the media was controlled by only five companies.
If the deal goes through, Sinclair's stations will reach nearly 70 percent of all households in the United States.
TV Trolls
What does that fake news look like? Sinclair has broadcast videos made by hoaxster James O'Keefe, who has a record of producing misleading, heavily doctored video 'stings' of progressive individuals and organizations. (O'Keefe's attempt to entrap a Washington Post reporter, which reads like slapstick comedy, illustrates his methods.)
Sinclair's Circa subsidiary presents itself as an unbiased mobile news site, but reportedly skewed its reporting to its owners' political agenda after its acquisition by Sinclair.
In 2004, Sinclair refused to broadcast an episode of "Nightline" in which the names of soldiers killed in combat in Iraq were read out loud. Sinclair called the program "politically motivated" and asked why anchor Ted Koppel didn't read "the names of the thousands of private citizens killed in terrorist attacks since and including the events of September 11, 2001."
As the Washington Post reports, Sinclair planned to air a "documentary" distorting John Kerry's war record just before the 2004 election until public pressure forced it to moderate the broadcast. As the Post also reports:
"On the eve of the 2012 election between Obama and Republican Mitt Romney, for example, Sinclair stations in several battlegrounds states aired a corporate-produced half-hour news 'special' that criticized Obama's handling of the economy, his signature health-care law and the administration's management of the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Romney's record received less scrutiny."
Sinclair is currently forcing its stations to air the right-wing commentary of a former Trump aide named Boris Epshteyn, who displays no perceptible gifts as a commentator. (Judge for yourself.)
In another "must-air" segment, a commentator named Mark Hyman declared that "we have the greatest health care in the world" -- a statement that can be objectively disproved by comparing the U.S. with other developed nations -- and that ""government-directed health care can kill."
Sinclair is also working to drum up Islamophobic sentiments with a recurring segment called "Terrorism Alert Desk," which opens with a blast of "breaking news"-style music to present stories (and sometimes non-stories) that share no common theme -- except that they consistently cast Muslims as terrorists.
"Read Exactly as Written"
Now, internal memos obtained by CNN show that Sinclair is requiring all its news anchors to condemn the reporting of mainstream news outlets as "fake news." Sinclair's memos direct stations to air its pre-scripted attacks on journalism "using news time, not commercial time."
"Please produce the attached scripts exactly as they are written," stations are told. The scripts include this language:
"I'm [we are] extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that [proper news brand name of local station] produces. But I'm [we are] concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.
"The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarming, national media outlets are publishing these same fake stories without checking facts... members of the national media are using their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control 'exactly what people think'...
"We understand Truth is neither politically 'left or right.' Our commitment to factual reporting is the foundation of our credibility, now more than ever."
Fake news outlets on the internet do the same thing: They tell readers that "they" are lying, but "we" are telling you the unvarnished truth.
To be sure, mainstream media have often misled readers and viewers. But they have not done so at the direction of a single, central office with a political agenda and transparent ethnic and religious biases.
"I felt like a POW recording a message," one news anchor said of the Sinclair scripts.
No More Media Consolidation
If this is how Sinclair Broadcasting Group behaves while its massive merger is awaiting approval, how will it act when it has everything it wants?
Sinclair's proposed merger must still be approved by the FCC and the Justice Department. It is taking place during a time of mounting public pressure on the government to address media consolidation, as behemoths like Disney, Fox, Time Warner, ATT, and Comcast increasingly control what national audiences see and hear.
In 1983, 90 percent of American media was controlled by 50 companies. Forty years later, 90 percent of the media was controlled by only five companies. The Sinclair/Tribune merger would accelerate that trend.
Sinclair is a case study in the threat that media consolidation poses to democracy. This merger must be stopped.
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