Here & Now

UW Professor On The Aftermath Of Sinclair

Frederica Freyberg:

Now to the controversy surrounding Sinclair Broadcast Group. The corporation owns television stations that reach 40% of American households. This week a compilation video of the company’s prescripted and some say partisan “must use” announcement surfaced. The company required local anchors to read the announcement on air. The script contained language that critics say legitimizes the idea of fake news.

TV anchor:

Sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories without checking facts first.

Various TV anchors:

Sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarming, some media outlets publish …

Frederica Freyberg:

We take this up with media scholar and UW-Madison School of Journalism Professor Lew Friedland. And thanks for being here.

Lew Friedland:

Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:

Sinclair had their TV anchors, as we’ve just suggested, read this “must use” statement decrying fake news on the part of other operations. What's your reaction to that?

Lewis Friedland:

Well, my first reaction is is that it’s a — Sinclair is taking this a bridge further than it already has. As you probably know, they have “must carries” that come out of their Maryland headquarters multiple times a week. At least nine times a week just for editorials. So it wasn’t anything completely new. But it is, to my knowledge, unprecedented in the history of American broadcasting for one central group, to have all of its anchors read a clearly political statement simultaneously on 173 stations. It’s never happened before.

Frederica Freyberg:

So you say that it’s clearly political. Could not it be construed as we’re just saying that we report the facts and we do our due diligence as journalists?

Lewis Friedland:

Sure. I mean, I think it was written in a way to give them a certain level of deniability. But the facts don’t really support that. The statement itself clearly conforms with the political line that President Trump and his spokespersons who’ve been promulgating for virtually since before the election, that the news is fake. It’s fake news out there. You can’t trust what’s on news. And that’s not really a kind of neutral statement, to be honest.

Frederica Freyberg:

Now, you were a commercial news executive in Wisconsin. Had corporate told you that you had to air such a thing, what would you have done?

Lewis Friedland:

You know, I've thought about that. And I had a young child at the time when I was an exec in Milwaukee. I’d like to think I would have quit. It’s easy to say for me now. But I would have — I would hope I would have quit.

Frederica Freyberg:

Sinclair has six stations in the Wisconsin television market. One of which is in Madison, which apparently defied the “must use” order and did not air this thing. What do you think is going to happen to them?

Lewis Friedland:

It's interesting. The station is under management of a very award-winning, solid news operation here in Madison. So they aren’t really an independent Sinclair news operation in that sense. They might lose their contract at some point. I don’t know. But that’s purely speculative, I have to say.

Frederica Freyberg:

Now, you mentioned this a little bit earlier, but, again, this isn’t new for Sinclair. They mandate these editorials by Donald Trump’s former campaign senior adviser. Does this blur the line between news, and opinion, and politics?

Lewis Friedland:

Absolutely. It completely blurs the line between news, opinion and politics. And we think the important issue to think about here is that, yes, we’ve had Fox News. We’ve had MSNBC. We have the cable environment. We have newspapers in which those lines have been–well, less newspapers but where the lines have been blurring in cable certainly for 20 plus years. But these are local broadcasters. These airwaves are owned by the public. They’re not owned by Sinclair. They’re not owned by the local stations. The station is not owned by the state of Wisconsin. It’s owned by the American public. And they hold those airwaves in trust. It’s a public trust. They do not have the right to simply propagate political viewpoints in a very limited broadcast space in local communities at will. And that’s the difference.

Frederica Freyberg:

You say they don’t have the right. Are there laws regarding this?

Lewis Friedland:

That's an interesting question. There are — the Fairness Doctrine was repealed under Mark Fowler, President Reagan's FCC chair, I believe ’87. It could have been…I need to check my year. But — so since then, stations have not been required to air balanced viewpoints. However, there is still a public trust obligation. There’s still a licensing obligation. And there’s still the Doctrine of Localism, which says that stations have to operate in the interest of their local community. So I believe it wouldn’t — of the most salient issues on the table here is whether crowding out local news for national news, and not only national news, but national opinion that skews significantly to one side of the political spectrum, is actually serving local communities. There’s some new evidence that suggests that it’s not.

Frederica Freyberg:

Very briefly, less than 30 seconds left, there’s a merger in the works, too, between Sinclair and Tribune Media, which would make Sinclair even bigger, reaching like three of four households in the U.S. So this could be a blanket of coverage in this regard?

Lewis Friedland:

They would be the largest broadcast — they are the largest broadcast group in the United States. They would become the largest by far, more than doubling their current reach. I think that every American has to ask themselves, do you want one company in 215 communities in the United States broadcasting what is effectively, truly one-sided opinion for one political party.

Frederica Freyberg:

Professor Lew Friedland, thank you very much.

Lewis Friedland:

Thank you.