A Sinclair Exec Bought The Baltimore Sun And Is Turning It Into A Right Wing Propaganda Mill

Back in 2018 (pre-brunchlord owned) Deadspin posted the definitive video on Sinclair Broadcasting, highlighting in less than two and a half minutes how the local broadcaster is a right wing propaganda mill pretending to be a local news organization and the poster child for why media consolidation limits still matter:

Like Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, Daily Caller, Breitbart, Daily Wire, and other parts of the ever-growing right wing disinfo machine, Sinclair publishes a rotating crop of shallow infotainment, peppered with oodles of misleading fear-mongering over crime, homelessness, and immigration.

Sinclair executive Chairman David Smith recently purchased what’s left of the Baltimore Sun (much to the chagrin of ex-staffer David Simon), and it’s going just about as you’d expect. It’s only been a few months, but staffers there are already becoming angry about the fact that the paper is now publishing anti-immigrant and anti-trans right wing propaganda dressed up as serious news and analysis.

A statement by the Baltimore Sun Guild says the paper’s “ethical standards have been tossed aside under new ownership,” and points to a May editorial by new Sun co-owner Armstrong Williams that called the transgender movement a “cancer”:

“It was not the first time that The Sun’s ethical standards have been tossed aside under new ownership. In the opinion pages, co-owner Armstrong Williams has used offensive language to describe transgender people, flouting the best practices once adhered to by The Sun. In a May 8 column, he likened the “transgender movement” to a “cancer,” and used the terms “biological male” and “biological female” to exclude transgender people, which AP style instructs journalists to avoid.”

The Conservative movement’s not subtle goal is to buy up what’s left of traditional journalism (and once popular social media companies) and fill it with propaganda that consistently tells right wingers exactly what they want to hear: namely that all of their ugliest impulses are, in fact, correct. And, more importantly, that minorities, women, Jews, and immigrants are to blame for the entirety of societal ills.

You could argue that what happens to a dying newspaper isn’t worrying. But it’s part of a broader trend, and in response to fascism, the U.S. journalism editorial Overton window is clearly shifting steadily rightward.

Most of the money in media right now is in either feeding this fact-optional Conservative victimization and outrage complex (see: Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Russell Brand, etc. etc.), or in creating sloppy “AI”-powered engagement chasing news infotainment simulacrum that distracts and defunds real reporting. Sometimes a fusion of both.

Both the Washington Post and Daily Beast recently hired right wing UK tabloid executives. Both old and new Politico top executives whine about “wokeness.” Conspiratorial opportunists like Vivek Ramaswamy want to own companies like Buzzfeed. CBS and CNN under Zaslav have cozied up with Trumplicans for ratings. That’s before you even get to what Elon Musk has done to Twitter.

These trends are all sanctioned by billionaire media owners threatened by the kind of hard-nosed journalism that meaningfully critiques wealth, power, and systemic discrimination. Their goal is to take the brand corpse of what used to be U.S. journalism, fire all the real journalists, and stock them with bobble-headed sycophantic center-right propagandists whose sole purpose is to create a giant, automated, gushingly pro-greed, ad-engagement outrage circlejerk masquerading as news.

The U.S. is not really doing the kind of things needed to counter this trend at any real scale, whether it’s funding and shoring up education standards, crafting media consolidation rules and policies, maintaining search engine quality, funding and protecting local libraries, academia, or disinformation research, or finding creative new funding models for independent (especially local) journalism.

There has been a welcome shift toward worker-owned journalism outlets and direct-to-consumer newsletters (the ones not being written by Nazis, anyway), but it’s not clear these efforts can survive billionaire lawsuits, much less counter the problem at scale. If you’ve read global history books, it’s all enough to make you nervous.