[legitster]

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.

[Grieving]

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.

[pmyteh]

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).

[legitster]

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.

[stonogo]

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.

[exsinclair]

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

It was.

[cryptoz]

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.