By Evan Derkacz in Alternet:
"Set aside "values" and voter fraud for a moment and just take a look at Sinclair Broadcasting Group. If the nation's largest owner of TV stations didn't actually help reelect George W. Bush it wasn't for lack of effort. Their message to America now: Our man won, deregulation will continue and we've only just begun... to expand.
"More Agressive Than Fox"
For starters, a single studio at Sinclair's home office in suburban Maryland, known as "NewsCentral," creates news segments which are then mixed with live broadcasting at the 62 stations to create the "illusion of local news," as Paul Schmelzer put it in an AlterNet article from late October. He went on: "In some cases, personnel at the local station have to coach on-air personalities at Sinclair central casting on tough regional pronunciation of town names."
The Sinclair story reads like a cautionary tale about media consolidation. The centralized and hierarchical structure allows a tiny editorial team in Maryland to fundamentally control the news that reaches nearly 25 percent of the American audience. The product, says media critic Jay Rosen, is "more aggressive than Fox News Channel."
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