
FCC declines to punish Sinclair for its ‘must-run’ segments and scripts - listentojohan
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/12/fcc-declines-to-punish-sinclair-for-its-must-run-segments-and-scripts/
======
beckler
The FCC does have the authority to revoke licenses based on content, but it's
rare for them to do so.

However, this entire situation is ultimately a consequence of revoking the FCC
fairness doctrine.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine))

For example, a news station did have their license revoked by taking a strong
stance against civil rights, and violated the fairness doctrine.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WLBT#Opposition_to_civil_right...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WLBT#Opposition_to_civil_rights))

~~~
rhino369
The fairness doctrine was hardly ever envoked. Attempting to apply it to a
situation like this would not be constitutional. The fairness doctrine was
found constitutional when it required a rebuttal to a direct personal attack
during an era when there were only 3 stations. But this situation is
different.

It was never applied to a sitation where a network required "must run"
content. At best, the fairness doctrine would require at least some dissenting
opinion on the issue. The Supreme Court, in upholding the fairness doctrine,
said it should never be used to limit speech. That's what critics want to do
here, punish Sinclair for running content.

Arguably, the fairness doctrine is no longer constitutional at all. The
court's reasoning relied on there being limited channels. That is no longer
true. Even on broadcast, there are 20 channels available. If democrats don't
like Sinclair, they can go start their own network. When you consider all the
other sorts of media available, its just not credible to argue that there is a
legitmate concern that people cannot be both sides of an issue.

~~~
Shendare
>The fairness doctrine was hardly ever envoked.

I (a layperson) don't really follow this. It sounds to me like "while the
rules were in effect, they were rarely broken".

>an era when there were only 3 stations. But this situation is different.

Lots of station numbers, run by just a handful of owners:

[http://www.neatorama.com/2008/07/07/who-owns-what-on-
televis...](http://www.neatorama.com/2008/07/07/who-owns-what-on-television/)

~~~
gh02t
OP's point was that Fairness Doctrine was never a hard and fast rule because
the FCC was hesitant to actually enforce it due to free speech concerns.
Broadcasters were generally willing to cooperate, but they got lots of wiggle
room. Plus it was vague and easily sidestepped.

I worry it could do more harm than good nowadays if reinstated. Suddenly anti-
vaxxers and people who think climate change is a hoax would have to be given
more coverage, for example.

------
move-on-by
I can see why the FCC might be hesitant to get involved with these segments
and scripts. However, the Sinclair merger should unequivocally be rejected.
This business pattern only becomes an issue once you get monopolies and
oligopolies. We need competition and variety in our news sources. Oligopolies
are extremely dangerous to our democracy.

~~~
dabbledash
It would be very hard to view them as a monopoly in any case if you consider
all the other media sources they compete with.

I can’t think of the last time I saw broadcast local news.

~~~
rhino369
Any justification for censoring Sinclair would apply 100 fold to Google or
Facebook.

Its just not constitutional to ban Sinclair for running pro GOP content.

~~~
kolpa
Sinclair has a government-granted monopoly on the frequencies on which they
broadcast. Google and Facebook offer service accessible over the (almost
entirely) capacity-unconstrained Internet medium.

~~~
rhino369
And a movie theatre has a government granted monopoly on a piece of land on
which they show movies. Doesn't mean you can't just build another one next
door.

Facebook has an actual monolopy on an entire market.

~~~
gregdunn
TV broadcast frequencies are a far scarcer resource than land.

~~~
will4274
And yet, there are more TV stations than movie theatres in many towns.

------
chiefalchemist
Call me crazy but it's time for a legal definition of news (vs editorial) and
then have that definition forced. If false advertising is a faux pas then news
that's not attempting to be objective and forthright should be labeled.

Most of the so called news / journalism isn't news / journalism any more than
Aspartame is sugar. If you can't call Aspartame sugar then consuming content
should be forced to be as transparent.

~~~
jsgo
While I agree, I think I'd be saddened by what it would suss out: that people
don't really want news.

The sad part would be that even after this, people would still look to the
Hannitys, the Maddows, the Carlsons, the Lemons of the world for their news. I
understand the reasoning behind it (zero effort way of processing news). Where
it does become dangerous is if someone turns a non-news/fake news item into a
talking point to deceive the viewer into thinking it is legitimate like the
content based on real news items.

I guess the beginning of the end was to allow channels specific to "news" to
propagate. In an ever growing fight for ratings, something if we're being
honest that shouldn't be a news team's goal, they've had to at best fluff the
news or at worst make it controversial for ratings sake. I like CNN and feel
them to be fairly "even", but even I have to question the "Boy Who Cried Wolf"
nature of constant BREAKING NEWS items that are on their site at any given
time and I would imagine is pretty frequent on social media (at least,
anything I see shared from CNN seems to have breaking: at the beginning).

Maybe the local news showing national/international news format would be best,
but with some kind of regulation to prevent them from politicizing it. Now
what _that_ would be defined by, I'm not sure. It probably wouldn't be heavy
in ratings though.

~~~
bradleyankrom
I think putting the Hannitys and Carlsons on the same level as the Maddows and
the Lemons implies a false equivalency. Everyone has an agenda, yeah, but one
of those groups is deliberately misleading its viewers.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Um. They're all pretty deliberate. They're all gainfully employed based on one
key KPI: ad revenue. They have a target market. They have a narrative. And
they work that to the tune of ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.

Death by cancer is still death whether it's Red State death or Blue State
death. That's about as equal as it gets.

None of the four you listed quality as news or journalism. One another day we
can discuss what they really are, but news and journalists they are not.

~~~
bradleyankrom
What qualifies as news or journalism?

~~~
jsgo
From what I've seen, and I could be wrong, David Muir seems to deliver in a
way that doesn't seem heavy in bias. Admittedly, I don't watch ABC a lot so I
don't see a ton of him, but his content seems pretty impartial.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Perfect example. He's nothing more than a talking head. He's reading a script
off a teleprompter. He's there - and Katie Couric isn't - because he tests
well and the rating are strong.

That doesn't make him a journalist. Nor does it make what falls from his lips
news.

~~~
jsgo
Will have to agree to disagree on that one. And I think he's there and Couric
isn't is due to Couric at a certain point trying the Barbara Walters track
pivoting into the talk show side of things.

But I think him being fairly interchangeable with another journalist is an
indicator that his role isn't personality driven like the previously
mentioned: he's there to deliver the news and that's essentially it. I think
his Gaza Strip/Haiti/etc. work qualifies him as a journalist and from what
I've seen of him, has delivered factual news (with varying levels of
importance, but realistically, it is unlikely to have hard hitting items
daily).

~~~
chiefalchemist
If you have links to the segments mentioned I'd like to watch. Tia

------
arca_vorago
FCC doesnt seem like it's protecting consumers. I think if I were POTUS I'd be
using this section of its mandate.

"Communications during emergencies and crisis must be available for public
safety, health, defense, and emergency personnel, as well as all consumers in
need. The Nation's critical communications infrastructure must be reliable,
interoperable, redundant, and rapidly restorable."

The honest thing is that the FCC has already shown itself to be a problem by
allowing the media mergers and aquisitions in the first place, and the people
who made those decisions should be held to account as far as the statue of
limitations allows, but also should the institution (preferably by congress).

I'm starting to get really tired of "independent" government agencies being at
the heart of root problems.

~~~
KZeillmann
Were you under the impression that an Ajit Pai-led FCC would be intent on
protecting consumers?

~~~
craftyguy
I don't think anyone was under that impression. But there are literally no
solutions to the Ajut problem that any of us can contribute to.

------
jsgo
Torn here. On the one hand, I hate the "must run" items, yet on the other
hand, I see this as being a slippery slope if they were to punish as that'd be
dictating to a company what is allowed on their stations.

Having said that, two things:

1) I'm glad it was exposed and wish it were highlighted more than it was. This
gives viewers the ability to discern how valuable they find the content to
know that scripts were dictated to their newspeople.

2) I'm hoping, though doubtful, that this prevents Sinclair from buying up
other small market stations as they've shown their hand as to what they'd do
with a monopoly.

~~~
mrguyorama
The problem here that I see is one of "false advertising" If you present
yourself as "News", that has certain connotations. Publishing this forced run
content without disclaiming that it is not independently sourced journalism
IMO violates those connotations

~~~
pnw_hazor
All news is subject to editors/publishers making decisions about what is
included, excluded, omitted, broadcast-ed, etc., for political or commercial
reasons.

It has always been this way.

------
downandout
I don’t get what the issue is here. I have seen this message on my local
television stations. What is missing from the YouTube video is an invitation
at the end of that message for viewers to contact the station with any
concerns about bias in its own reporting. In fact that is the entire point of
the script, and it has been cutoff of the YouTube video, presumably because it
appears to be more controversial that way. Oh, the irony!

So a large media company recognized the problem of bias in the media, which
could become a business problem if it affects confidence in their news
reporting, and invited people to contact them if they noticed this problem
creeping into the individual news stations’ reports. Where is the controversy
here?

~~~
IAmEveryone
Do you really believe Sinclair doesn't have the manpower to watch their own
programming to check for any 'biases'?

And if you believe they are somehow incapable of noticing biases: how would
they adjudicate any complaints they get?

That request for comments is either a McGuffin needed to have a reason for the
preceding rant slamming all other media outlets.

Or it's a ploy to get local stations in line with Sinclair's corporate agenda,
by asking their viewers to rat them out to headquarters.

~~~
downandout
Umm...wut? Would you not agree that bias is in the media is a major issue
today, and that it may cause a significant percentage of viewers to abandon a
given station or website if they see too much of it? Before the 2016 election,
I regularly watched CNN and visited its website. Now it’s such a den of
partiality and clickbait headlines that I have relegated it to HuffPo status
and cannot trust anything I read there, so I simply don’t go there. I’d
imagine there are others that feel this way too.

So if I’m a media company and I see complaints about my stations or a decline
in news viewership, I’m going to take steps to stop it from happening.
Companies often don’t know that they have problems until customers express
their opinions about them, and so Sinclair is trying to keep an open dialogue
with their viewers. Since when is asking customers how they feel about your
service a bad thing?

~~~
IAmEveryone
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance)

~~~
downandout
So you’re saying that media is not biased, that in fact all of the people
saying that there is a bias are trying to portray a “false balance”? Have you
looked at the CNN homepage recently? If you u don’t see bias there, there’s no
point in continuing to discuss this with you.

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jcwayne
This assault on the journalistic integrity of local news must stop! Before you
know it they'll have so many must-runs that I'll never find out if my toaster
really is going to kill me.

~~~
nugi
I have on good authority that everyone who owns or uses a toaster, will in
fact die.

------
pnw_hazor
Alternative headline: FCC declines to violate the First Amendment of the US
Constitution.

~~~
specialist
Broadcast licenses are granted on the basis of serving the public interest.

With great power comes great responsibility.

------
Bizarro
It's disturbing the number of people here calling for and defending the need
for a Ministry of Truth.

------
DINKDINK
"This is extremely dangerous to our democracy."[1]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEDkMTO0mSI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEDkMTO0mSI)

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jadedhacker
Very weird that a consolidated media company would force its viewpoint to be
propagated. This is very unlike the rest of the media and a genuinely new
phenomenon. /s

(2012) [http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-
control-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-
control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6)

If you think that these companies aren't pushing a viewpoint you got another
thing coming. Hint: It's pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist, anti-worker, and
anti-political dissenters.

------
Shivetya
I support the decision, Pai even did something similar when Trump went on one
his tirades about taking licenses from the large news companies. He even
quoted the Democratic Senator Markey is this reply.

Sinclair can easily lose its trust with its viewers let alone its own talent
and that can effect change. There is already scripted news out there that
presents facts in a similar manner. It all comes down to, who is upset by it?

if Washington politicians are the ones upset then I am not concerned. They
already exert such control over the media by simply coercing news to play nice
or lose access that we should always be worried when they want to stifle any
speech.

------
Covzire
Right wing media has pointed out the same 'creepy talking point synchronicity'
happening in the larger mainstream media for many years. Just like with
Cambridge Analytica, certain behavior is only raised by the media as a scandal
when amateurs try to the same thing the big boys have been doing for
years/decades.

~~~
mabbo
Really? Which news outlets had dozens of news anchors read, word for word, the
same script that was given to them by their owners and played as if it was a
local independent news story?

It's unprecedented. It's not about which politics the story supports, it's
about the media and public being manipulated. Ajit Pai's response shows he
either doesn't understand that or wants everyone else to think it's about
something else.

~~~
Covzire
Remember Journolist[0]? The views of the major news stations and papers have
been heavily aligned in one direction for several decades now. Journolist was
hard evidence that they colluded in delivering talking points not just among
one brand but multiple brands at the same time. Like I said, Sinclair are
amatuers to what has, and we have to assume is, going on with most other
outlets.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList)

~~~
s73v3r_
You're confusing the issue. The issue here isn't a bunch of stations being
aligned; the issue is the parent company mandating a word-for-word reading of
a script that furthers the parent company's interest.

------
hexenhammer
I’m not sure why there is all of th controversy. This is not new.

