That's the whole reason this is a story. The viral clip was assembled by far-left think tank ThinkProgress to attempt to torpedo the merger by stirring up public outcry.
And of course, the mainstream media, who indirectly compete against these local stations, is happy to support these efforts.
When I grew up, local news was (surprise!) somewhat independent. Each television show had their own particular style of reporting or emphasis on what they tended to cover. I never considered local TV news to be terribly great in quality compared to the newspapers, but at least it wasn't monotone in nature.
So, there's nothing really wrong with the spiel per se (everyone has bias and opinions). Except that it was pushed to 100s of television stations via local news channel, to be read exactly out loud as written.
That's a pretty strong argument to torpedo the merger. Forget the political angle... apparently on Sinclair stations, there's a push to make local news and national news no different. This is what really is terrible. Approve the merger and you probably will get the same effect of the massive consolidation of US radio in the 1990s after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (the mergers pretty much killed off programming that focused on local and regional tastes or music, killed off the already dying freeform DJ outside of community radio, which stagnated music variety considerably (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/music/perfect...)...)
In the end, what Sinclair is doing is probably going to is not good for their long term business anyways. This mass-scripted thing has drawn quite a bit of negative publicity, for a start. And using the 1990s radio example, well, terrestrial radio is quickly dying due to irrelevance. The "800 lb gorilla" winner of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Clear Channel (iHeartMedia), recently went bankrupt after all.
I felt firsthand the crushing effect of clear channel on radio in my market and do not want that to happen to television.
Edit: I’m still kind of confused why local stations cover national stories unless they concern a local event or story (or just do a super generic AP-style readout if there’s a major US story). But most of my local stations have national affiliates that already cover national stories (ABC NBC CBS)
If you have evidence of abuse, or are worried that it might be happening, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll take a look. Obviously, if we find abuse we'll deal with it. But not without looking at the data.
What's not ok is to cheaply invoke these categories because someone holds different views from you or posted a bad comment to HN.
I've posted about this a ton if anyone wants to read more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....