The Daily - Friday, Apr. 6, 2018

Episode Date: April 6, 2018

On local TV stations across the United States, news anchors have been delivering the exact same message to their viewers. “Our greatest responsibility,” they begin by saying, “is to serve our communities.” But what they are being forced to say next has left many questioning whom those stations are really being asked to serve. Guests: Sydney Ember, a New York Times business reporter who covers print and digital media; Aaron Weiss, who worked several years ago as a news director for Sinclair in Sioux City, Iowa. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, high, the news anchors all start by saying, our greatest responsibility is to serve our communities. But what they are forced to say next has drawn attention to local news stations and who they are actually being asked to serve. It's Friday, April 6th.

High Witness News at 10. A complete report with Patty Weiss and Bob Richardson. Michael Goodrich with the weather. Ron Brooks on sports. And the Eyewitness News team. Hello there. Here's what's happening at 10. For Arizonans, Decision 80 is just eight hours away. My mom was an anchor. She was the first female evening anchor in the state of Arizona.

It'll be a busy day with voters choosing a president, a congressman, a senator, and various local offices, such as supervisor, assessor, and school board. Tucson is a place that she moved to when she was a child. Went off to San Diego for a couple years, but she moved back, became an evening anchor a couple years after that. years. But she moved back, became an evening anchor. A couple of years after that, I was born. I've seen video of it, a news hit and a story that ran the day I was born when they sent a camera over to visit my mom in the hospital room. So were you essentially brought into this world on TV? I mean, the camera wasn't there as I was being born. It was there a couple hours after. there as I was being born. It was there a couple hours after. Aaron Weiss worked in local news for 14 years. I went off to college and wanted nothing to do with journalism. I majored in theater. And after college, I went off to Microsoft and did the tech thing for a couple years.

And it was only after I'd been there for about a year that I realized I was missing that instant gratification. So I took a week off and went back home to Tucson and hung out at the station for a week and wrote some stories and went out on a drug bust and proved I could do it. And so they hired me as a producer. So you started to work in the newsroom where your mother was an anchor. I did, though I very rarely saw her. Most of my time there, I was producing the morning show. She was anchoring the six and the ten. So we would literally pass in the night. She'd be wrapping up the late shows. I was showing up for the overnight shift. And how did you like the work? I loved it. It's incredibly rewarding.

You get to make something every day and see the results of what you do every day. And then you come in the next day and you've got a blank slate. And was there something about the fact that it was local news that made you take pride in it? Yeah, it's that connection to a community. It's odd because local news is a very transient business.

Very few folks stay in a market for years or decades. And the ones who do tend to be those trusted local anchors. My mom could have played the TV news market game and left Tucson and picked up the family every couple of years, you know, from a Tucson to a Phoenix to a Los Angeles. To bigger and bigger markets, right. But she didn't. She chose to raise her family in Tucson because it was a sense of place. And I will always be thankful to her for that.

Okay, folks. We'll be back tomorrow. Good night, everyone. Good night. We'll be on at 4.30 tomorrow. That's right. So what was your first big break in the news biz? So I was in Tucson for about a year and a half and decided to see what else was out there and ended up heading up to Portland, Oregon. So I took an associate producer position,

bottom of the rung, pretty quickly worked my way up. And after spending my 20s in Portland, which is a great town to be single and in your 20s in, I got married, had a kid, and we decided it was time to head somewhere else. So I started looking around for other positions and ended up getting offered a news director job in Sioux City, Iowa. And it was a big promotion for me at that point. I'd been a manager on kind of a fill-in basis in Portland, getting to run the newsroom when folks weren't there. But getting my own newsroom, my own shop was a great opportunity. So we packed up and moved to the Midwest. This is Siouxland News at Sunrise on KMAG-14. Police say this man is passing counterfeit bills and they want your help catching him.

Iowans who are terminally ill might get easier access to And what was your vision as news director for running this TV station? For me, it was a chance to build something. It was a small, struggling station. It came from an ownership group that had gone through a fairly spectacular bankruptcy a couple of years prior. It was still basically being held by the bankruptcy court and the creditors. And you know, in a market that size that you're going to be working with maybe a few veterans, but primarily new reporters. And that to me was exciting. So you knew going into this job that this was a small station, that it was financially struggling. And it sounds like those two things were in some ways a draw for you because it meant that you had the ability to put

your own imprint on it. Yeah. It was that feeling of being a part of that place. When did that feeling, which it sounds like this was going well and that you were enjoying this work, when did that feeling start to change? So after I'd been there for about a year and a half, we got word that Sinclair was looking at buying the station. And these things take a couple months to close. Sinclair ended up officially buying the station in fall, around October of 2013.

So Sinclair was founded in 1971 by the current chairman's father, Julian Sinclair Smith. He was an electrical engineer with a deep curiosity about new broadcasting technology. Sydney Ember is a media reporter for The Times. And the company started off very small. It was one radio station and one television station in Maryland, in Baltimore. But it wanted to get bigger, and it started buying more and more stations,

which coincided with this sort of deregulation that allowed companies to own more stations. We saw no reason, no harm to the public that would result from networks acquiring stations. And after all, the touchstone on this, it seems to me, ought not to be the interest of the Hollywood producers or the networks or the group owners, but rather whether or not the viewers in particular markets are better off. And we believe they will be if we permit groups to be able to acquire other stations. And that doesn't mean that independently owned stations don't do very well. They do do very well in markets, depending upon the owners and their management capabilities. But there

are, the economists tell us, some very good efficiencies that result when an entity is able to grow larger. And this oftentimes serves our people very well in our society, and we ought not to lose sight of that. So there might have been a time where a company could own a set number of stations. There might have been a cap, and suddenly there wasn't. That's exactly right. You know, for a long time, the cap was, I think, five, and then they moved it up to seven and then 12. So suddenly it's possible for a company to own not just a handful of stations, but a very large number of local TV stations. Yeah. And by the early 2000s, Sinclair owned, you know, something like 60 stations across the country. We knew the station was up for sale and someone was going to come in at some point and buy it.

The fact that it was Sinclair looking at us was also not a surprise and on paper seemed like a good thing because you've got a very large, well-resourced company coming in. And so the hope would be an owner like that comes in and starts giving you more reporters. You start adding newscasts, the sorts of things that you'd hope to see when a well-resourced company comes in to what had been a poorly resourced station. And I'd hope they would have seen what we were doing there as something that had a lot of potential for growth. So what happens at these stations that Sinclair is buying up? What changes about the actual day-to-day operations? So sometimes these stations are happy to hear that a company like Sinclair is buying them

because they'll now have resources to go out and report local news, resources that they might not have had before Sinclair came in. But pretty quickly, these stations start to realize that things aren't as rosy as they seemed. So right around the time the sale is closing, I fly down to North Carolina for a meeting with news directors from other stations that had been recently acquired by Sinclair. And we're all at the airport.

We get on a van on the way to the hotel and we're talking. And someone asks about must-run pieces. So a must-run is a segment that is generally centrally produced that Sinclair asks its stations to run. It sends out these segments to its stations across the country and it says, run these during a specific period of time. So it's not a polite request. It's generally not a polite request, no.

It orders these stations to run them. And the explanation that came from another news director who'd been part of the group for probably a couple months was just that, yeah, these stories come down and you bury them at like 5 a.m. when no one's watching. And yes, they're conservative, but you just run them and you move on. The implication was not a big deal

and that corporate wasn't really watching or cared when they ran. Hello, I'm Mark Hyman. So, Aaron, after the sale to Sinclair, when is the first time that you interact with content that surprises you, maybe even startles you? It was probably one of the Mark Hyman commentary pieces. Is the DOJ being used to silence media groups that hold the Obama administration accountable? Islamic radicals believe it's their calling to convert or kill all non-believers.

It's time to ignore the crazies and adopt a sane energy policy. To turn a blind eye to those who fit this profile and to invite them into our communities is irresponsible. Black churches in those counties organized a Souls to the Polls campaign to drive Obama voters straight from church to vote. We may soon see another Islamic State.

For more on this story, visit BehindTheHeadlines.net and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. I'm Mark Hyman. I mean, they were clearly labeled as commentary, and that continues to be Sinclair's defense to this day, is, well, we label our commentary as commentary. But you're still using your trusted local anchors who do not have a bias and have spent decades playing completely down the middle. You're using those trusted local anchors to give credence and to give weight to that commentary. What did you make of the fact that these directives were being handed down within this company

to the stations and that you really didn't have much of a choice about how to respond to them? That was new and is still to this day completely unique to the way Sinclair operates. still to this day, completely unique to the way Sinclair operates. I'd been part of other large and small station groups, both before and after my time with Sinclair. And the way corporate works in every other station group in the country is that they'll provide guidance on the broad picture of the way you cover the news or present the news. But the day-to-day content decisions about what each station runs in every other station group is left to the local news directors. And if there is corporate content that comes down, it's something that stations can run if it fits. And there's

actually not a whole lot of it in other station groups at all. With Sinclair, it's different. It is something that you must run, and you must put it in your newscast, and you can't touch it. And that made me as a journalist very uncomfortable. Did you ever ask your anchors or the reporters on air to fulfill these orders? your anchors or the reporters on air to fulfill these orders? Yeah, sometimes. I wasn't keeping very close track, I guess partially because I probably didn't want to know. So you didn't want to talk about it because you were in some ways ashamed of it? Oh, deeply ashamed, uncomfortable, whatever you'd like to call it. It was just a fundamental moral quandary on my part. I just couldn't do it.

It comes down to that sleeping at night, looking at yourself in the mirror in the morning. Was at that point I realized I needed to find something else. of what Sinclair was asking you and your colleagues to do, because you had a fundamental objection to what your new corporate parent was doing. Absolutely. So since 2014, Sinclair has continued trying to grow, but it basically hit a wall at a certain point because of regulatory limits on how many stations it could own. And when President Trump was elected, Sinclair and its chairman, David Smith, began pushing for changes to these regulatory limits on the number of stations it could own.

If you believe, as I do, that the federal government has no business intervening in the news, then we must stop the federal government for all out of the newsroom. And quickly, the Federal Communications Commission began rolling back regulations. And one of the things it did was it eased a cap on how many stations a broadcaster could own. And Sinclair benefited immediately announcing a deal for Tribune Media, a company you might recognize because it used to be a company that owned a lot of newspapers like the Los Angeles Times. But today they own a lot of newspapers like the Los Angeles Times. But today, they own a lot of local TV stations. So in buying Tribune, which is what Sinclair wants to do,

it would be buying up dozens more TV stations. That's right. This merger would allow Sinclair to reach seven in ten American homes, and it would have more than 200 stations across the country. Would that make Sinclair the largest owner of TV stations in the country? Sinclair, in fact, was already the largest owner of stations across the country, and this deal would make it even bigger. And Sydney, what have we seen with Sinclair's programming in the past few years? So since November 2015, Sinclair has required its stations to run a daily segment from what it calls its terrorism alert desk, for example.

From the terrorism alert desk in Washington, I'm Lindsay Mastis. Some British officials say terrorism-related arrests are at a record high. These are generally sort of fear-mongering type segments. It's a 68 percent increase from the year before. 68% increase from the year before. And they also will run conservative commentary from pundits like Mark Hyman and Boris Epstein, who's a former spokesman for President Trump, on the latest conservative talking point, whether it's media. CNN, along with other cable news networks, is struggling to stick to the facts. Or North Korea.

The president is sending a message to Kim Jong-un that if you do not back down in diplomatic discussions with Tillerson, you're going to have to deal directly with Donald Trump, who will be a lot less interested in niceties. Or healthcare. Government-directed healthcare can be deadly. Or terrorism. The threat of terrorism has not diminished.

We continue to be under constant threat of attack. Or taxes. Half of us are paying for everyone else. Or tariffs. The new tariffs on steel and aluminum are pushing our trading partners to engage in fair trade with the United States. And they're definitely right-leaning segments

that are then shown on local newscasts. Is there a sense that Sinclair has gotten more liberated to do this and might even be doing it more since Trump was elected? I don't know if they're doing it more, but people are definitely noticing more. Hi, I'm Fox San Antonio's Jessica Headley. And I'm Ryan Wolf. Our greatest responsibility is to serve our San Antonio community. We're extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that Fox San Antonio produces. But we are concerned about the troubling trend of

irresponsible one-sided news stories plaguing our country. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. People really started noticing what Sinclair was doing last weekend when the website Deadspin published a video that showed anchors at dozens of Sinclair was doing last weekend when the website Deadspin published a video that showed anchors at dozens of Sinclair stations reading the same anti-media, I would say, script. More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories without checking facts first. And fortunately, some members of the media use their platforms

to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. The must-runs in the past have generally been introduced by an anchor with a script, but then there are prepackaged segments. This was different in that all of the anchors were actually reading the same script.

So the anchors became the segment. The anchors became the segment, that's right. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarmingly, some media outlets have published these stories that we are true without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. And this is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. So what did you think when suddenly, just a few days ago, this all exploded in the national media with this video on Deadspin? What were you thinking when Sinclair's relationship with these TV stations suddenly became national news? I was deeply sad for everyone in those videos. I was deeply sad for everyone in those videos. They were people I knew, people I'd worked with, people I may not have worked with but have seen on the air for years. And to some of their credits, they gave that video all the sincerity of a proof-of-life hostage video. Meaning they looked uncomfortable. Oh, they were clearly uncomfortable

by what they were being expected to do and say. I don't think any, certainly not many of them, truly believed what they were reading, but they had no choice. It sounds from what you're saying that you are sympathetic to what these anchors had to do. I'm absolutely sympathetic. And that goes back to me growing up.

I think about, had that been my mother in 1983, if I was six, seven years old, and my mother was told to read something like that, she would have had the option of stand up for your values as a journalist and quit and lose your job and then find some way to feed your family. Or she could have read it and done it and sucked it up and said, all right, it's a bad promo, but I've got to work and I want to be a journalist. And every single one of those anchors that has a family, that has a spouse, that has a connection to a community that they have lived in for 20 or 30

or 40 years, every single one of them was in that position. And what does your mother think about all this? Did she watch that video of all the Sinclair anchors saying the exact same thing. She saw it. I'm sure she was as horrified as the rest of us. She's been out of the business for over 10 years now. She lives in Seattle now. She gets Como, Sinclair Station up there, but she doesn't watch much. And honestly, I don't think she watches much TV. And honestly, I don't watch much local TV anymore either. We don't have cable anymore. And where I

live up in the mountains, you can't get anything over the air. So occasionally I'll stream a local newscast on my phone if I'm feeling nostalgic, I guess. But I guess in some ways I've moved on too. Sounds like both of you, in a sense, have started to give up a bit on TV news. I think we have. Well, Aaron, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Michael, it's been my pleasure. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

Answering a question from a reporter aboard Air Force One on Thursday, President Trump denied knowing about the $130,000 payment that his lawyer, Michael Cohen, made to the adult film actress Stephanie Clifford weeks before the 2016 election. A payment she says was meant to prevent her from discussing an affair with Trump in 2006. The claim could complicate the president's legal battle against Clifford,

who has claimed that the confidentiality agreement she signed is invalid because the president never signed it. By denying that he knew about any agreement, the president appeared to be confirming Clifford's argument, which could allow her to break her silence without consequences. Why did Michael Cohen make it if there was no truth to the allegations? You have to ask Michael Cohen, Michael's attorney, and you'll have to ask Michael. Do you know where he got the money to make that payment? No, I don't know. Do you know where he got the money to make that payment? No, I don't know.

The Daily is produced by Theo Malcolm, Lindsay Garrison, Rachel Quester, Annie Brown, Andy Mills, Ike Srees-Kamarajan, Claire Tennesketter, Paige Cowan, and Michael Simon-Johnson, with editing help from Larissa Anderson. Lisa Tobin is our executive producer. Samantha Hennig is our editorial director. Our technical manager is Brad Fisher, and our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderland. Special thanks to Sam Dolick, Michaela Bouchard, and Daniel Ramirez. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you Monday.