 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Welcome to What's on Your Mind Hawaii, I'm Tim Apachella. Today we bring this show back into the studio to cover a topic that is getting some degree of concern for those who watch local news. Sincere Broadcasting Group is one of the largest media companies in the United States. Recently, the group found itself in the middle of controversy by ordering its news anchors to read a script word for word, decrying the dangers of media companies of running fake news stories that they obtained from social media. The warning that media companies, be it print or broadcasts fake news, this sounds quite familiar to President Trump's often mentioned criticism of news media. Requiring news anchors to read pre-written scripts seems to be an overreach of a media company to demand from its journalists. This is particularly true since Sincere owns 173 news stations across the country and required all of them to deliver a script. A video which went viral was produced by DeadSpit.com, eerily shows multiple newscasters reciting the scripts in perfect unison. Harsh criticism from the public has been directed to both Sincere Broadcasting and to those local news anchors who deliver the script. News anchors have confided with newspaper reporters on a confidential basis because they're in fear of losing their jobs. They have been receiving a great deal of hate mail from viewers for their role. Most say they had no choice in the matter and hated delivering the script. With me today to discuss the issue of independent journalism versus a media corporate giant with political leanings and their influence on the local news is Brent Overgaard, Professor of Journalism for the School of Communications at UH Manoa. Brent, thank you so much for joining us here today. This has been quite a serious topic that's come to light just recently and for many it's been a very serious topic and quite of quite concern. Yeah, it's quite troubling to see this, the way DeadSpin put it together I think really brought the issue home of why we should be worried about and concerned that big conglomerates are reaching into the heartland and buying small stations and trying to spread their messages throughout those outlets. Well we all know that all politics is local so when you get control of local news stations by some way or another maybe you influence politics so that's kind of one of the concerns many people have. Yeah, it's also targeting a weakened part of the journalistic structure where newspapers have been losing staff and losing resources and these small TV stations don't have much in terms of journalists on their payroll so a lot of times it's what's the easiest story we can do today and when you can fill air with these kinds of... Must Runs. Must Runs. Must Runs. Right. That kind of fills the void that they're constantly struggling with in terms of what's going to be on the air, makes their parent company happy and the big losers in all this are the viewers. Yeah. Well, I wanted to just take a quick look at what set this controversy off and that was potentially news anchors from 173 stations reading a script that was basically directed from Sinclair Broadcasting Group to these news anchors and I guess the point of this clip is and it's been caught on by all other news agencies. They have run with this. So this is, in a sense, a viral portrayal of this video and how eerie it is to see word for word all synchronized and so it's a news story that everyone's picked up on. So let's just take a quick look at that. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarmingly, more alarmingly, out of the media. There's enough of that, but as you can see, you can see why news anchors would have some concerns about this and why media companies have been showing this around the country for the last few days. What was your impression of that? Well, I think the most striking part of this is that if Dead Spin wouldn't have clipped that all together, it would have been an unnoticed, untold story in this whole Sinclair Broadcasting Group saga. And the person who created it was clever enough to put it in a form that people could really understand what was at stake here. And without that work, I don't think this would even be a story. Really? That's quite a statement. Yeah. I mean, this is something that the Dead Spin person crafted to show what was really happening. And without that, you just have an individual broadcast here, individual broadcast there. There's no way to really comprehend it for most people. Yeah. Well, they did a beautiful job. We everyone owes them a credit and a big credit to the fact that they've single-handedly have raised an issue that now is going viral, number one. And number two is the issue behind these viral videos. Yeah. It's a curious case of a journalistic organization creating a piece of media, a piece of coverage that becomes the story. And again, without that video, I don't think people would have paid any attention to this must read because it's been going on for a long time and it happens in lots of stations. Well, that's what we're going to talk about a little bit in this show. And I wanted to ask you, why should the public be concerned that Sinclair Broadcasting Group is requiring news anchors to air the must-runs of spots and also having their anchors read a word-for-word script? Why should the average viewer be concerned, remotely concerned about that? Well, there's many levels of controversy there, but you start with the idea that who controls your news. Most people have the perception in these smaller and mid-sized markets that their local news is created by local people who shop at the same grocery store as them and live basically the same lives as they do. Instead, it's getting piped in from some headquarters, and I think it's somewhere in Maryland, basically directing this broadcast propaganda-type message into all of these different stations that are generally considered to be independent and also highly trusted. Local news is one of the most trusted parts of the journalistic media sphere. And people trust their local anchors and the people they see on TV from their community because they think they're just reporting local news, reporting what's happening around here. And they see those people every day. They let them into their living room. They build a relationship with them. Now, that's an interesting point, because I think a lot of the public, the viewers, they maybe avoid the national news stories like Fox or MSNBC, because they're tired of it. They just don't want to get involved in the national politics. They're tired of the polarization of the Republicans versus the Democrats. And they've just had enough. So a lot of people have gone back to the local markets, local news, to say, I want to get away from that. But the irony is, Sinclair Broadcasting Company is interjecting, if you will, some of the national headlines that they were trying to get away from in the first place. Right. Sinclair's MO, when they take over a station, is they reduce local coverage. And they reduce staff. And then they increase national coverage. The Washington Post just did a study on this, and they estimated it's a 25 percent increase in national coverage. So yeah, I saw Emory University in Atlanta did a study on this, between the study was involved 743 stations between 2017 and 2018. And in that study, when Sinclair took over a new station, local stations were basically doing about 4 percent of political stories. Not soon after Sinclair acquired them, that went up to 25 percent. So that's an amazing delta that occurs within one or two months of ownership of Sinclair. It's part of a pattern. It's not a coincidence or anything like that. It's part of their strategy. Their strategy is to influence people across the country. They're not so much interested in what happens in El Paso, Texas. They're interested in having the most stations, the most reach, so they can broadcast their message to the most number of people. So let's talk a little bit about Sinclair and that exact reach. Sinclair basically, on the FCC website, docket number 17-179 says that Sinclair Broadcasting Company owns 173 local new stations or 528 channels and 81 markets. Now they're trying to acquire Tribune Media, which owns 42 new stations and 33 markets. If the FCC approves that acquisition, and right now the proposal is that Sinclair wants to spend $3.9 billion to acquire Tribune, and if that goes through, that will result of Sinclair having a 72 percent market share in all U.S. households. Now I'm not familiar with the definition of monopoly or the Sherman Act of antitrust, but 72 percent of market share for all media and local markets, that seems relatively high to me. Well, they'd be the largest chain of TV stations, which I mean, you have to compare it to say the national stations like CNN or Fox News. Fox News is the number one cable station, so they have an enormous reach. And CNN, of course, they have a large reach, too. But what you're talking about here is a kind of a filtering up from the bottom type of reach. And they're getting into these markets that wouldn't necessarily watch CNN or even Fox News. They work 12-hour days, people come home, they're tired, they turn on their local TV station, and they want to know what's happening around them, and they get this extra dose of propaganda stuck into their salad. You used the word propaganda, and I think that word has been mentioned before by other concerned viewers. And the question is, what is the role of FCC particularly because we have a new administrator that was recently appointed by Donald Trump, Mr. Prajit Pai, and he has really turned around a lot of things that were quite the norm when it came to broadcasting standards. For example, the second he was basically appointed in 2017, the rule was reversed that all local news, or if you're an owner of local news, you have to have representation in the community. And that was an 80-year rule that's been basically dismantled. So I don't know if that was the rule that plowed the way for Sinclair to come in and do other acquisitions of local news stations at a higher percentage than normal or not. Well, deregulation started in the mid-90s with the Telecommunications Act, and what happened was basically people felt that with the digital emergence of channels in the internet that they could have less strict guidelines on who owned what channels and in what markets and information would be fairly distributed among people. What really happened was the people with the most money bought all the channels and then you have a magnification of their voice that's like we've never seen. People will buy more than one television station in one market, like you see here in Honolulu. They will buy the newspapers in the market, they'll buy the radio stations, and suddenly not that they own all the channels, and this is the same with Sinclair. Sinclair doesn't own 70% of the channels around the nation. What they have is a footprint in 70% of the markets. Market share. Yeah, so in every place you might live, you're going to have this message circulating among the people living there. And that's the big concern about the consolidation and also the monopolistic practices. So I guess my question is we'll get maybe a little bit more into this after the break, but who's the watchdog to prevent a monopolization of communications? Well, it's supposed to be the FCC. But if you have a director like we have now who's basically knocking down all the walls and gates, then there's not too much to stop it. And it gets into, we already have a big problem with media consolidation throughout the country, this far preceded Trump or anybody else. And basically, like I said, it started in the mid-90s when people started buying chains and things. And what we have is fewer and fewer people owning more and more of our channels. And then... This fear of influence increases. Yeah, and a lot of it is we don't even know what's being left out. A lot of it's behind the scenes. Let's get back to that after this commercial because you've hit on a very important topic. So I'm Tim Appichella and I'm here. We're talking about Sinclair Broadcasting Group and we'll be right back. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host of Likeable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., I hope you'll join me for Likeable Science where we'll dig into science, dig into the meat of science, dig into the joy and delight of science. We'll discover why science is indeed fun, why science is interesting, why people should care about science and care about the research that's being done out there. It's all great. It's all entertaining. It's all educational. So I hope you'll join me for Likeable Science. Hello, everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Welcome back to What's On Your Mind Hawaii. We're talking about Sinclair Broadcasting Corporation. Basically buying up the local market share of local news stations. I'm here with Brett Overgaard, and he is professor at University of Hawaii, University of Hawaii at Manoa. And he, your professor in the School of Journalism for the School of Communications. Associate professor, School of Communications. I gave you a promotion. Sorry. Yeah, you gave me a promotion. Not the wrong of that, as long as it's a company with pay. Well, I want to talk about, we talked a little bit before break about the FCC and Sinclair as far as its size. Now when this controversy came to play, actually President Trump chimed in. Not surprisingly. In fact, he chimed in about 2.34 a.m. on April the 3rd on Twitter account. No surprise there either. What he said though in regards to this controversy of Sinclair having these anchors read a script and, you know, through all the markets throughout the country. So what he said was, this is President Donald Trump, the fake news networks, those that know and they have a sick and biased agenda, and that was all CAPS agenda, are worried about the competition and the quality of Sinclair Broadcast. The fakers at CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS have done so much dishonest reporting that they should only be allowed to get awards for fiction. So that's our Commander-in-Chief protecting our First Amendment rights and the media's First Amendment rights, but that's our President of the United States. Any comments about that little tweet? Well, I mean, it's this classic propaganda that we get from this President in the sense that there's no detail to it, there's no specifics to it, it's just a smear. And his basic strategy is to smear anybody that doesn't agree with him instead of dealing with, you know, the particulars of his concern. Like, if you have a particular complaint with a media organization about something they publish, you request a correction. And then the company will investigate and see if they're wrong and if they're wrong, they run a correction, and that's standard practice. No journalism organization can be perfectly correct all the time, it's just impossible because sources give you wrong information, documents are wrong, people transpose things on their notes. Reports are human beings. Journalists are human beings. And there's things that go wrong. So what really, the journalistic ideology is about correcting errors. If you make them, you try not to make them, that's the first step. In the second step, you try to triangulate your information to make sure that if somebody tells you something wrong, you catch it with your second or third source. But if a mistake gets in, then you have a formal, transparent process where you say, we made a mistake, here's our mistake, here's the correct information. And we just wanted you to know that. And the New York Times does a great job of this. Sometimes they'll correct things, mistakes made 100 years ago. Really? Yeah. I was reading an old copy of the New York Times, I found this mistake and they'll correct it. And that's the kind of exemplar ideology that journalists strive for. Now what this particular tweet is saying is that, because all of these organizations have made a mistake at some point in their existence, they're all fake and everything they do is fiction, which is a laughable claim. Well it wasn't by coincidence that the executive chairman of Sincere Broadcast Group said that print media serves no real purpose. And then he further on said, I must tell you that in all the 45 plus years I've been in the media business, I have never seen a single article about us that is reflective of reality, especially in today's world with shameful political environment and generally complete lack of integrity. Now that is the chairman of Sincere Broadcast News. Now, not to be outdone though, there's always an opposite answer to everything. So the Society of Professional Journalists, which most journalists subscribe to, for their content information, they're all fake. They're all fake. They're all fake. They're all fake. So the Society of Professional Journalists, which most journalists subscribe to, for their content information and a guideline for ethics. The Code of Ethics is what binds journalists, the SPJ code or other code of ethics. That's what it's all about. If we don't have licenses, we don't have some kind of test we take, we either prescribe to the code of ethics or not and the people who prescribe to it are the ones that are considered journalists. So this is what National President Rebecca Baker said in response to David Smith. And that is, it appears Mr. Smith is attempting to discredit any and all journalism except that produced by 193 television stations he wants or controls throughout 39 states. This is a serious attack on not only to thousands of hardworking print journalists across the country, but on the free press as protected in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It is not good for the country or journalism to have any one individual or company control such a large portion of news being broadcast. And I should say after this tit-for-tat response, David Smith is going to be meeting with the Society of Professional Journalists to discuss this very issue. So I don't know when that meeting is taking place, but it's going to take place. Well, I mean, it's quite an argument he's making that everybody makes fake news except for us and only watch our stations. I mean, this is a kind of a charlatan argument that you would make about any kind of or only a most disreputable type of salesman would make about their competitors. So if you want to control the sentiment of the country basically also how you get your votes, isn't reshaping the media probably one of the most effective ways of doing it? Well, there's a lot of ways for that to play out in modern media structure because you have social media, you have extended interpersonal media through mobile devices. But that said, the biggest channels get the most ears and eyes. And if you can get into those, that's the best way to sell your message. It's just a numbers game. And like you said, people at the end of the day are tired. They just want to go to their local news and watch local news interest stories. And they don't expect Sinclair to be interjecting their national political messages in there. Right. In the beginning of democracy, people understood that they had to earn it. You know, they had to be a citizen to make it work. They had to spend some of their day building their democracy. Today, people kind of take it for granted, I think, and they don't put in the time or have interest in perpetuating democracy. So they just want to watch their TV news and expect it's going to be okay. So really, the onus is on the viewer to figure out what is real, what is valid, what is reliable in terms of news. And I don't sense that a large number of Americans really want to do that work. Well, they're pressed for time for one. Press for time. Yeah. And they also have become tribal, you know, in terms of... Our politics have become very tribal. Yeah. And so it's a lot easier to just say, is this person a Republican or are they a Democrat? If they're a Republican, I agree with everything they say. If they're Democrat, I disagree with everything. That's interesting. And then vice versa. And that takes no work. Yeah. In the intro of the show, I mentioned that those news anchors that did read this script required by Sinclair Broadcasting Group, they've been taking a lot of heat. And I guess the question is, when students are in the School of Journalism or Communications and they're taught about SPJ's code of ethics, what are they taught? Are they taught that this is not an easy business and you will be placed between a rock and a hard spot as a journalist? And what is your obligation to that code versus... I call it the hanging sword method of persuasion from an employer to mandate that you do something that may be in direct violation or opposition to your code of ethics. What do you think? What do you guys teach in the School of Journalism? Well, to begin with, our foundational document is the SPJ code of ethics. So we build our structure on top of that. We don't build classes saying that you're likely to run into a bunch of unscrupulous people who are going to make you violate this. But we do have entire classes about ethics in the gray area of ethics. And even though this code we use is quite well done and detailed, there are always gray areas. And so what we teach our students is the process to figure out what you're dealing with here where it fits with the code, where it's in between parts of the code. The one I'm thinking of specifically within the code of ethics is to act independently. For all journalists to act independently. I'm not sure how that looks when a journalist is required to read a script from a national conglomerate in Maryland. I don't know. Yeah, I mean it's one of those things that any job you have in journalism, you know, you have a job and you have a paycheck and you have bills to pay. You have to decide does this particular affront to your sensibilities demand that you resign immediately? Or do you just reject? There's a couple options here. Number one, you read it and you keep your job and move on with life. Number two, you say I just won't read it, which some people did. There was a woman in Eugene that I read. She just said, I'm not going to do it. And she posted a photo of the SPJ code of ethics on her Facebook. Wow. I'm not going to do it. Good for her. And then there are other people who resigned. But that's a hard choice for any boss to put on you. Like say, read this or we're going to fire you. And they also have these elaborate contracts. Well, the contracts also may specify that you have to pay back. Sinclair, a certain portion of your salary should you leave the company. Right. So we're almost out of time. I think the next show that we're going to do, you're going to be here with Jay Fiedel. And you're going to talk about what can be done about this infiltration of Sinclair Broadcasting Group in today's marketplace of media. So, Brett, I want to thank you so much for joining us today. Great pleasure. Your comments have been really very well timed and very poignant. So thank you so much. Thank you. And this is Tim Appichella. This is What's on Your Mind Hawaii. And we'll see you in two weeks. Aloha.