Washington Post
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2020–2022
3:42 · 304K views · Apr 3, 2018
A short Washington Post explainer on Sinclair Broadcast Group, the local TV owner that became widely known after a video showed its anchors reading an identical mandated script.
Cited as an example of corporate-mandated scripts and concentrated media ownership.
3 comments from Hacker News
I think putting this policy in place is actually good for Twitter's bottom line. People will be promoting all kinds of competitors and trying to get people on Twitter to retweet those things. A competitor is some site that acts as a third party, not the actual media article or primary thing to link to. So Twitter having this model makes business sense. Does it makes Elon Musk a hypocrite? Of course it does!!! Capitalism restricts free speech, and even compels other speech. Here is an example: this video Anytime an employee (e.g. a news anchor) has to stay away from topics, repeat talking points, or get fired and replaced by an organization, that is capitalism at work. They are an employee being used as a mouthpiece, not a human being saying what they really think. Capitalism and private ownership of large organizations is not about freedom. The concept of ownership is literally about restricting other people's freedoms to do as they wish with what you own, and compelling employees to do this or that, or get fired. There's this weird assumption that capitalism somehow encourages free speech. And guys like Elon Musk and Donald Trump are therefore associated with it, and allowed to spew garbage about Free Speech, because they're billionaire capitalists. Um, no. To go in depth, watch this interview I did with Noam Chomsky last year: [LINK]
It's easier to believe when from your understanding of the world the other side is blatantly lying and misrepresenting things. It forms a bit of a positive feedback loop where seeing bad intentions leads you to being less likely to give slack so you see more bad intentions. From the left looking rightward at Fox News and many local stations (increasingly owned by and forced to run identical scripts from Sinclair Broadcasting) [0] at the response and the response to the response to coronavirus for example it's hard to ascribe that to just a different interpretation of facts. [0] this video
So much that they even end up repeating exact phrases in their seemingly independent broadcasts, as seen in this video