Sinclair Broadcast Group Dragged For Scripted “False News” Promos

The Sinclair Broadcast Group has been in talks to enter a $4 billion merger with Tribune Media, but while that deal has been marinating, the broadcast group has been cranking out some very eerie promos that combat “false news” that make local anchors feel more like Stepford anchors.

Earlier this month, CNN reported that Sinclair, which owns and operates nearly 200 television stations in the country, had many of their news anchors read a promo script that seems cut from the same cloth as Donald Trump’s “fake news” rhetoric that he tends to mention more often than not. The script read by the anchor refers to the “troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.”

A supercut of anchors reading this script (see below) was posted on Deadspin and it is alarmingly creepy. Hollywood figures such as Silicon Valley‘s Kumail Nanjiani have called Sinclair out saying that they are “buying up local stations all over the country & using them to push their extremely biased agenda.” House of Cards creator Beau Willimon has called for a boycott of locally-owned Sinclair stations saying, “This is what corporate authoritarian propaganda looks like.”

As a refresher of Sinclair’s past, Alyssa Milano tweeted out a clip from John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight from last year which putting the controversial broadcast group on blast for injecting its conservative political views via written scripts to be read by local news anchors and “must run” stories to influence its viewers.

Watch the videos below.