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If you are dismayed by the way that Gannett has dismantled the proud traditions of The Commercial Appeal and butchered its staff and if you believe the Nashville mother ship displays an appalling lack of knowledge about our state, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Just wait until Sinclair Broadcast Group is approved to purchase WREG-TV and it brings its political agenda and coverage to our community.

When it comes to Gannett, Memphis is an afterthought – if thought of at all –  in decisions made by the Nashville newspaper executives who oversee the statewide USA Today network, insulting local readers with a “premium” section like the recent one music in Tennessee that distinctly cast Memphis in the shadow of the capital’s country music.

Or the article, “10 Things to Know about the Memphis Hustle,” with a byline that said it was written by Commercial Appeal reporter David Ammenheuser, who is actually sports editor for the Nashville Tennessean, or as they call him there, “sports strategist.”  Then, there was the high-profile coverage of the Veterans Hospital scandal in Memphis which was covered from Nashville.

These days, it’s not unusual to see the same article or photo twice on the same page, or a story like the one about Ruby Tuesday’s which said: “Locally, the chain has two restaurants in Alcoa, and one each in Athens, Harriman, Jefferson City, Knoxville, Lenoir City, Morristown, Newport, Powell and Sevierville.”  Or The Fix magazine inserted into the newspaper and heralded as “Your Mid-South Home and Garden Magazine” that has a cover story and four-page spread about a family in Nashville.

Snuffing Out The Light

All in all, it’s a strange concept.

In order to sell more newspapers, Gannett drastically reduces news coverage.  In order to sell more news, rather than prove greater value through a deeper dive into Memphis, Gannett believes we will be moved to pay for news from cities sprinkled across Tennessee as far away as 440 miles.

We could go on and on, and many of us do on a Facebook page, Gannett Screws Our News, but you get the picture.

There was a time when The Commercial Appeal’s tagline, “Give light and the people will find their own way” was more than a slogan.  It was an operating principle.  It is now a historical footnote and nothing more.

And yet, Sinclair Broadcast Group is about to show us exactly how bad news coverage can be if the U.S. Department of Justice gives the go-ahead to its purchase of Tribune Media’s 42 televisions stations, cementing its status as the largest owner of local television stations in the U.S.

Case In Point

Its request for approval of the purchase comes at the same time that the U..S. Department of Justice is considering AT&T’s purchase of CNN, one of President Donald Trump’s favorite targets.  During his presidential campaign, he pledged to reject the purchase, and already, there are signs of political motivations in the deliberations about the sale.  That said, if the Trump DOJ approves Sinclair Broadcast Group and rejects AT&T’s bid, it will lay bare that the powerful agency has become the vehicle for punishing Mr. Trump’s political enemies.

Most Washington, D.C., observers predict that the Sinclair deal will eventually be approved (the day before the Trump inauguration, Sinclair Broadcast’s top executive met to discuss relaxing regulations with Ajit V. Pai days before he was about to become the FCC’s chief regulator – deregulation was one of Mr. Pai’s first decisions) and when the sale is approved, Channel 3 will become hostage to a broadcasting group that sees its purpose as more political than journalistic.  If you believe the station now operates by the a philosophy of “violent crime all the time,” it will become “extreme right every night” under Sinclair.

Coverage of Judge Roy Moore’s pedophilia is a case in point.  Sinclair’s Birmingham television station, WBMA, attacked the Washington Post’s scrupulous coverage of the Senate candidate’s sexual assaults and heralded the fact that it could not find a single voter who had turned on Mr. Moore.  The segment included just three interviews.

The coverage was no aberration.  It was exactly the coverage directed from the headquarters of Sinclair Broadcast Company, and it doesn’t stop there.  Sinclair executives have sent local stations soft ball questions to ask of arch-conservative icons like Ben Carson (whose business manager is a business partner of Sinclair).

Right Wing Mandates

The corporation also sends stations extremist right wing commentaries to broadcast them.  The commentator of choice Is a person most political junkies are familiar with – Russian-born, New Jerseyite and Trump propagandist Boris Epshteyn.   Sinclair calls him “chief political analyst,” but his claims to fame are his reflexive defenses of all things Trump and his commentaries often are verbatim the president’s exact talking points.

The mandatory “Bottom Line with Boris” segments have been called Trump TV, but that’s a moniker that could just as easily be claimed by Sinclair itself.  It shoves all kinds of progressive issues and events under the coverage of its “Terror Alert Desk.”

Remember in 2004 when Ted Koppel, on Nightline, dedicated a program to reciting the names of the U.S. military who died in Iraq.  Sinclair refused to allow its ABC affiliates to broadcast it, claiming that it amounted to editorializing.  More recently, Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law with the bulging portfolio of priorities, said that the campaign had a special deal for Sinclair to provide special coverage and access.  It’s a charge that Sinclair denies, although independent research concluded that that the company gave a disproportionate amount of neutral or favorable coverage to candidate Trump while regularly presenting Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton negatively.

One email instructed stations to read: “Why did Hillary Clinton struggle with disclosing her medical diagnosis?  She has been repeatedly faced with previous questions of trust.  Can a president lead with so many questions of transparency and trust?”  There were similar email instructions from Sinclair headquarters mandating specific questions or themes or stories to be covered.  There were no corresponding must-run stories about President Trump’s medical history, tax returns, or family entanglements.

But that’s not all.  Sinclair produces segments that are actually paid by advertisers, such as the positive coverage of Huntsman Cancer Institute.  They look like real news segments and viewers are not told that they are a quid pro quo for financially underwriting them.

Puppet Masters

That’s the reality.  Here’s the risk: television news remains the main source of news for most people in our region, and if they are like most Americans, they trust local news more than national news.

If Sinclair acquires Channel 3, most viewers will be unaware of the way the strings are being pulled in the company’s executive offices and how local reporters are hamstrung in exercising the principles they learned in J-school.

As Sinclair mandates ultra-conservative commentaries and skews news coverage to suit its political opinions, it is a step toward transforming Americans’ most trusted news source into an instrument of propaganda.

It’s what makes Sinclair different from Fox and MSNBC.  We know we are tuning into coverage that has a specific political perspective with those channels, but when we tune into our local news stations, we have the presumption that they are adhering to the professional principles and ethics that we expect from reporters who live in our own community.

Think again.

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