PAM VOGEL: Sinclair Broadcast Group is already the largest owner of local television stations in the country, and they own stations just in -- pretty much exclusively battleground states, mid-sized cities, this is the heart of the country, and they have sort of some unusual practices that they use. So, they mandate their local TV station, for example, run specific segments called “must-runs.”
Sometimes they're political commentary, sometimes they're updates on what they would call terrorism, and this latest script that we were just hearing was actually read by the local anchors themselves, which was a little bit of an escalation.
And so, I think folks now are sort of zoned-in, and hearing more about Sinclair, sometimes for the first time, because when you watch your local TV station, you don't necessarily know just by looking at the screen who owns the station.
You're watching your local newscast, your thinking about the anchors who are on air, whose faces you can see, or you're thinking about a logo in the corner that might say ABC, or NBC, or CBS. But oftentimes, ABC isn't really the one -- they're not the ones in charge, ultimately. It's actually the person who's owning and operating, and in many, many cases, it's Sinclair.
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If you aware of Sinclair and what they're working on, and how they sort of -- the strategies that they use, in terms of the other type of “must-run” segments that they have their local stations running, in fact, the one-sided bias that these anchors are talking about is actually something that Sinclair is employing itself, in different capacities, because their commentary sections, or their commentary segments, excuse me, are -- they only have one person doing commentary right now, and it's a former Trump aide. So, there isn't really two sides to that, so to have their anchors talking about one-sided bias, it just feels really disingenuous.
