Multiple local news stations say the same thing verbatim [video] | Hacker News Reader

Multiple local news stations say the same thing verbatim [video]

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186 pointsgarraeth69 comments

As the video description says "Found the clip, sharing it here." We probably shouldn't link to someone who just stole this clip. On the other hand, the original clip was posted on Deadspin, which was mismanaged so badly that the entire staff ended up resigning roughly a year after they first posted this clip so I don't want to link to them either. So instead I will point to the author of the original article that contained this video, Timothy Burke [1][2]. He has an insane setup for capturing television broadcasts and does a lot of great work like this to highlight the most interesting and troubling aspects of news and sports television.

[1] - https://twitter.com/bubbaprog

[2] - https://www.patreon.com/bubbaprog

A stealth tech company in Calif-US created a system to record as many news casts as possible, 24-7, and invoke the closed-caption system to annotate it, and make it searchable. The company was sold in the early 2000's for $1B+ ; I have never seen the name in any tech news.

source: colleague was a core engineer there

SnapStream by the makers of BeyondTV started doing this around that time frame. As another commenter mentioned, it is WIDELY used in media for searching/archiving/clipping programs.

I've no idea if it matches your story, but I hear a lot of shows use SnapStream to find content? https://www.thewrap.com/the-secret-to-daily-show-colbert-rep...

And I remember back when Google Video was a thing that Google was indexing feeds of TV channels' subtitles. I remember there was a search engine at one point for subtitles? Presumably they still index live TV subtitles and content both to support YouTube TV but also to feed content into their YouTube Content ID program... I wonder if anyone's comparing TV subtitles to speech-to-text output to catch differences in either.

Here's an article about Google's early Video Search product for captions: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/08/brief-history-of-go... Apparently displaying and searching captions to the public for free lasted barely 6 months... Here's a screenshot showing a search result: https://informitv.com/2005/01/25/google-video-search-for-tel...

I would've said this was no doubt bought by a financial sector company looking for bottom up sentiment analysis, but the whole premise of the parent post is that there's hardly such a thing as bottom up sentiment in local news.

As far as I can tell about how the unlimited cloud DVR on YouTube TV works, google is already recording all local news broadcasts all the time and retaining them for at least 90 days.

I don’t think they have any plans to do anything other than what they do now (selectively offer playback to subscribers who opted in before the broadcast), but makes you think it’s a solved technical problem that governments and other players are also probably doing.

This is what happens when one media company [0] keep buying up local affiliates.

Take a look at the stations, they are all owned by Sinclair:

Fox 29, San Antonio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KABB

Fox 66: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSMH

KATU 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KATU_(TV)

CBS 4, El Paso: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDBC-TV

KGAN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGAN

etc.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group

Relevant here is an article by Huffington Post from 2012 criticizing a bill to update the Smith-Mundt Act which prohibited the US government from spreading propaganda to American citizens. The congressmen were complaining that if other countries can propagandize Americans, our government should have the same right. Their update would effectively remove that prohibition. The bill was swiftly passed and made law.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/propaganda-public-diplomacy_b...

That bill was about "propaganda" like VOA... which is mandated to provide pretty damn fair and accurate news by other laws. Do you really think it should have remained (technically) illegal to click this link: https://www.voanews.com/ ?

In any case, that law/amendment has nothing to do with the video in this post. The reason all these stations are saying the same thing is not because of the government, it is because they are all owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, and those who run that company wanted to push this message.

Honestly, the quality of "government propaganda" from VOA is better than what we get from Sinclair.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/voice-of-america/

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/sinclair-broadcast-group/

VOA is not propaganda with quotes, it is real propaganda produced by American government targeted at other (mainly eastern European) countries. It is the same thing they complain about in RT and similar state controlled news stations.

It is propaganda in the most technical sense of the word, which is why I used it. I put it in quotes because it is a very loaded word with colloquial connotations that depart from the technical sense.

So, it’s good propaganda because it’s by the good guys?

A fair and accurate statement made with the intent to influence does, in fact, meet the dictionary definition of propaganda. This is not, however, the way that the word is typically used.

I worked with someone who worked in a local news studio. They told me that A LOT of the stories came pre-scripted.

Imagine you are a local news studio. You went from being responsible for 30 minutes of content a day to (often) upwards of two hours. And you only have a skeleton crew of on staff writers. To stretch the time, corporate offers a library of "stock" news stories and scripts to choose from.

I am told that local studios still have a lot of choice on what they use, but yeah, you're going to find a bunch of different studios grabbing the same script and not making any changes. Grain of salt.

I used to work for a local newspaper that had been operated by the owner's family for generations. Our content was almost entirely unique, with the exception of a few filler stories we'd occasionally pull from another source (small stuff like "Spring Cleaning Tips"). The owner was proud that we were the last small newspaper in the state to resist being bought up by the owner of the capitol city's paper. We were well-respected in the area, and it was joked that the only time we lost a subscriber was when they passed away. The owner died a few years ago. Her sons didn't want to keep her "hobby project" afloat, so the paper finally was sold like all the others.

A couple of years later I wrote a script to consolidate stories from news sites across my state and display them with a nice UI, since I have family all over the place and want to keep up with what's going on. The majority of stories were duplicated across all of them, and local news had become the filler content. Even for stories of national importance, they can be interpreted in so many ways that you'd expect different people in different areas to have different analyses of the facts (which is what used to happen), but that doesn't exist anymore. With the pushback against "fake news", official news sources are the only acceptable source of information, and those are monopolized by an increasingly tiny minority of people. BTW I don't put "fake news" in quotes to say that it doesn't exist, but that it's a catch-all term for propaganda that goes against the official propaganda.

That's absolutely true. I understand that this particular piece is a step beyond that: a 'must run' segment that was mandated by corporate (something for which Sinclair has form).

That's the thing: I don't know if anyone ever established that it's a "must run". I've only ever seen this clip as evidence for it, so I'm still not sure that it's not entirely conjecture.

It didn't really need establishing, since Sinclair themselves acknowledged it. The debate was over whether that was normal, which it is not: http://www.mediafiledc.com/sinclair-says-must-runs-normal-in...

Lots of people like to point to AP or Reuters as examples of copy-paste news programming, but that ignores the primary difference: affiliates select which AP or Reuters stories they want to air and/or publish.

Others compare TV networks like ABC or CBS requiring shows to be aired at certain times, but none of the networks mandate local news coverage like Sinclair does.

> I don't know if anyone ever established that it's a "must run".

It was.

That phenomenon has nothing to do with the linked video, though. They are totally different. One is news, from news agencies, the other is corporate right-wing propaganda from the owner of the station.

is this related to the sinclair broadcast group[1,2] or something else?

1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group#2018_...

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc

This is Sinclair, and I find it extremely funny that the right has taken this video to smear the rest of the MSM.

Woah, it's almost as if the right isn't monolithic

I think the point being made is that the smearing is not done in earnest and is a deflection tactic.

Hypocritical, but not wrong.

Thanks for the context!

Yep, here's another a 90 second clip demonstrating how Sinclair is a rightwing media news org, also using the same forced talking points across the board: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

That’s the exact same video as OP, buddy.

Although this one is the original source. It is only dated later because the video didn't originate on Youtube.

Tangentially related segment from Last Week Tonight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIi_QS1tdFM

I've consciously not watched news for at least the last 20 years. I never watched it much before that. My life is better because of it. It's nothing but fear mongering.

I heard once that the ten o clock news is when the presenter starts with a "good evening" then explains why it's not.

There is a recent Last Week Tonight covering sponsored content on local news stations which is worth a watch as well.

https://youtu.be/sIi_QS1tdFM

This is Sinclair Broadcasting Group which operates "a total of 193 stations across the country in over 100 markets (covering 40% of American households), many of which are located in the South and Midwest". It has had "must run" segments that all stations are required to run coming down from management that are generally right-wing talking points. In a John Oliver segment about Sinclair he stated that he "did not know it was possible to dip below the journalistic standards of Breitbart". Sinclair also struck deals with the Trump family and campaign to promote them during the 2016 campaign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group

I’ve always felt the media is generally reading from the same script. The News, locally or national, is more of a theatrical production than actual information.

There's a difference from everyone quoting from an AP or Reuters new service. It's an entirely different thing when one media company forces it's stations to literally read from the exact same script, or worse, force a must-run segment produced externally from the local station.

But it's not that much different. The main difference is who is doing the scripting. The reality is that local TV never did anything by themselves, they're repeating messages that have been fed by someone else.

>But it's not that much different. The main difference is who is doing the scripting.

That's just being totaly unrealistic. The news agencies like AP report news where forced must-run scripts from agenda pushing corporate owners cannot even be considered the same ballpark as "not much different"

>The reality is that local TV never did anything by themselves

If you are referring to local news reporting on anything outside the local area, then of course they don't do much themselves. If they had first party reporters outside of their local area, they'd no longer be a local news. This is why local news have partners in other markets, or other agencies like AP.

The classic Onion News Network videos are proof of your point. They're hilarious because while the content is ridiculous, the rhythm and theatrics are so clearly shared with every other newscast.

ONN has more in common with “satirical news” skits in UK comedy shows than BBC News. I know ONN is US-based, but still – the format is local.

Tangent, but to my American ear, the British English sense of "presenter" -- someone who reads the news -- seems to acknowledge the theatrical aspect of the role. More so than our "anchorperson" which seems to come from a game show.

This type of thing is why I like shows like https://unfilter.show/ that not only are "independent" but also provide some meta-commentary on the production of the news stories themselves, rather than just using the headline to jump off onto whatever rant they feel like.

The correct description for that kind of operation is not "news stations" but "propaganda outlets".

Another example: "You don't need us to tell you that gas prices are back on the rise", from year 2013 or earlier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjQkwB1IhPc

Search this in Google News: "mass shootings surge as nation faces record high"

https://www.google.com/search?q=mass+shootings+surge+as+nati...

The sites in those results (at least the 10 I checked) are all low quality blog spam. I suspect this is a politically motivated spam network created for the purpose of then using it as an example of media bias. Similar to what's happened in the parent story actually!

It happens at a national level, too. Especially when politics are involved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLEchPZm318&t=27s

All these stations are owned by the Sinclair Group, a right-wing broadcasting corporation that is eroding the editorial independence of local stations in order to run segments like these or the "terrorism alert desk" [1]. John Oliver had a great video on them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc

Also, the following quote is just utter BS, trying to draw a distinction where there is none:

> Reminder: "While it is extremely dangerous to our democracy..." the US is actually a Constitutional Republic.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ3hb6LhPGo

Nothing new I guess. Its like youtube reposting lol

But is it extremely dangerous to our democracy?

The national 'news' players do the same thing, except they (must) bother to reword it.

[2018]

Televised news is harmful manipulative crap. Just like most Google products you should avoid exposing yourself to it.

Of course I feel a little bad telling people this because it's pretty easy to avoid. Once TV news becomes unpopular they'll probably start shoving the same stuff into something that was previously mostly free of that kind of thing.

The new strategy is to saturate social media with the same talking points ad-nauseam. It’s especially apparent on Reddit and Twitter.

You can even do this with things that are true, to discredit them. Then, when someone independently comes to the same true conclusion, their friends can robotically shut them down with "you are just repeating side X's talking points!"

Or it's been "debunked," like the lab leak theory (until it was rebunked a couple months ago).

I think that is also a case of multiple different claims muddying the water, partly fueled by conjecture on social media.

There were (and still are) multiple “lab leak” theories that are in widespread circulation, ranging from “it is possible that there was accidental infection at a research facility” all the way to “it is a bioweapon”

The scientific community has always discounted the latter.

Also, science is evidence based, and so many scientists are (rightly) hesitant to make conclusions (and to support others conjecture) unless they have some sort of evidence to support it. China knows this, and knows they can avoid bad publicity altogether by limiting the evidence that is released. Scientists are not in a position to make political accusations in the absence of other information. “We don’t have any evidence to support that theory” is perfectly reasonable scientific statement, regardless of the political realities.

That’s a just-so narrative. Scientists can’t make political overtures and require evidence to draw conclusions, yet simultaneously are able to discount the weapons program hypothesis? It’s one or the other.

Anyway, one of the problems with media consolidation is that people don’t hear competing narratives, so whatever narrative a small group of people decide on is what ends up feeling true to people.

I think if you looked at the specific questions that top US scientists were asked, the questions may have been political at times, but the responses have always been scientific and based on evidence. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, although some have misinterpreted their responses to mean that. Science is a nuanced thing. Politics is a steamroller to nuance.

> yet simultaneously are able to discount the weapons program hypothesis? It’s one or the other.

You can discount it from the lack of evidence. I can be considered again once some evidence is available.

Another tactic is just keep implying there is a lack of evidence, with vague appeal to authority independent of anything.

> Televised news is harmful manipulative crap.

Not all news stations are the same, not all countries have the same TV news.

It is easy to just give up and think that you cannot trust anyone. But, the reality is that there is many journalists that care and try to create high quality news. To put them all in one bag is not fair, nor helpful.

What’s the old saying? 90% of X give the rest a bad name?

The problem lies in finding the high-quality journalists. A default assumption of “TV news is crap” is warranted by the signal-to-noise ratio. Nobody’s putting them in the same bag; they are already there and must be sorted out. And that takes time and attention that is already scarce for most people.

I don’t know if there is a viable solution to this that doesn’t start with journalists themselves. As you say, some have a great record. IMO part of that is, and will increasingly involve, more extensive provenance and supplementary documentation for the stories they report, whenever possible.

TV is a propaganda arm or the big companies. They will continue to spread the same type of content on other media, as long as they have money.

This also happens nationally, and on the web. Today one paraphrase is "Rumors are swirling about Dong Jingwei (董經緯)".

Not surprising since those are all Sinclair stations just repeating canned statements.

What’s really scary is when mainstream media outlets from a variety of corporate entities all repeat the exact same talking points that are exactly in sync with one political party.

I have seen something similar to this before, but for the left-wing stations.

This is not the same one that I have seen before, but here is another that I just found: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21271137/amazon-propagand...

There are a bunch more examples if you do a little research.

Newspapers do this a lot with Associated Press stories -- they're filler for what you don't have the capacity to create yourself. I don't really see a problem with it.

They might repost news from the AP, but not opinion pieces.

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