A supercut posted online Tuesday shows TV news reporters at Sinclair Broadcast Group stations spouting the same script in a takedown of Joe Biden. (Watch the video below.)
Sinclair jumped all over a widely questioned Wall Street Journal report that relied heavily on anonymous sources to assert that the 81-year-old president was experiencing cognitive decline. A prominent voice identified in the article, titled “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping,” was former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who reportedly had raved privately about Biden’s sharpness in the past.
Perhaps seeing the Journal article as a potential blow to the Democratic incumbent, Sinclair appeared to arrange a monotonously similar intro for many of its stations affiliated with major networks.
In the supercut, phrases like “calling into question the mental fitness of President Joe Biden” and “the issue could be an election decider” ― or small variations thereof ― play like a bad song on repeat.
Independent journalists Aaron Rupar and Judd Legum reported that the repetition was an example of how Sinclair outlets “launder hit pieces into the news cycle.”
The conservative media chain also came under scrutiny this week after union leaders at the Baltimore Sun complained that substandard stories — like an op-ed comparing the “transgender movement” to “cancer” — have appeared on its website since Sinclair’s David D. Smith bought the newspaper, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Sinclair has previously used a unified voice — some might say propaganda — to boost Biden’s 77-year-old Republican rival, Donald Trump. In 2018, the company forced its TV news stations to read Sinclair-written promos that echoed Trump’s ranting about “fake news.”
A Sinclair spokesperson on Wednesday defended the practice.
“Affiliates using a preproduced script for a package that has been provided by another media outlet is a common practice across the industry,” the spokesperson wrote to HuffPost, adding that this is “not specific to Sinclair.”
In the case of the Biden story, though, the segment being introduced was from Sinclair national correspondent Matthew Galka.
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