The Media Research Center has long denied the fact that Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the largest owners of local TV stations in the country, has a pronounced right-wing bias — after all, doing so would undermine its narrative that only “liberal” media bias exists, even as it becomes increasingly clear that its local news products are designed to advance pro-Trump narratives. When a supercut of Sinclair local news anchors were shown to push a story questioning President Biden’s mental fitness using almost identical language — as if corporate fed them a script they were ordered to repeat — it was time for the MRC to engage in damage control. Michael Wnek spun hard in a June 14 post, attacking those who pointed out Sinclair’s obvious bias as “clowns”:
Joy Reid hosted a panel of clowns on Wednesday’s episode of MSNBC’s The ReidOut to denounce local news stations questioning President Biden’s mental acuity. The panel of lefties condemned the Sinclair Broadcast Group for broadcasting a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report on the president’s age as it affects the election. They also portrayed the group as an insidious promoter of propaganda intending to deceive unsuspecting voters.
Turning to former CNN host turned Vanity Fair special correspondent Brian Stelter, Reid displayed the different TV stations owned by Sinclair and bemoaned their significant reach, claiming that “they’re pretending and masked as a normal news station” because they ran reports about President Biden’s mental state. Stelter exaggerated the supposed challenges faced by journalists working at Sinclair stations, who were forced to report on talking points mandated by an apparently tyrannical group.
He also insisted that the WSJ report was notably flawed, even though it specifically called into question the acuity of both candidates and mentioned Trump’s blunders as well as Biden’s.
Reid played another recording of when Sinclair “got caught…reading the same script on all these different stations that got busted,” misrepresenting it as a rare phenomenon exclusive to the broadcasting group.
MSNBC contributor Molly Jong-Fast decried it as a “nefarious” product of the “conservative echo chamber” and Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post. She dramatized him as a mastermind with “a vested interest in right-wing propaganda,” preying on vulnerable grandmas.
Kind of sounds like when the liberal media were singing from the same sheet music that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a “disinformation campaign” and “foreign intelligence operation.”
Wnek is engaging in false equivalence, attacking non-right-wing media for reporting what was news at the time — for which he offers no evidence of coordination — with Sinclair’s corporate overlords forcing local affiliates to read a specific script designed to boost Trump’s election chances. Wnek also offered no evidence that any other media group owner forced affiliates to read from a specific script, as Sinclair clearly did, to support his claim that this is not “a rare phenomenon exclusive to the broadcasting group.”
Wnek also tried to excuse claims that the Wall Street Journal article was “notably flawed” because it mentioned Trump blunders — but that wasn’t the issue. As CNN’s Oliver Darcy pointed out, the article relied heavily on Republican sources, who have an incentive to denigrate their political opponent, and refused to quote Democrats who vouched for Biden.
Wnek then played whataboutism with another claim: “Fake Republican Matthew Dowd regurgitated Jong-Fast’s raving contribution, arguing that Sinclair was “far more dangerous” than Fox News because it exploited the established trust in local news stations. Naturally, everybody at MSNBC is completely confident that the network covers the truth and makes no attempt to deceive its viewers.” Wnek offered no evidence that MSNBC is less truthful than, say, Fox News.