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Last Week Tonight with John Oliver - returns Feb 12th 2017

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N

Nightbird

Member
More insight from a redditor who used to work at sinclair:

This may jump around a lot, sorry it's too early in the morning but I wanted to get some of these out there:

Constantly under the thumb of corporate. They are controlling in all the worst ways.

The terrorism alert desk was a mandatory thing that our news director has to put in their early evening show.

Circa was forced to be promoted to a point that we had a commercial for it 3-4 times an hour. We were forced to use circa stories twice a day.

You may notice that the production quality is substandard to what you see everywhere else. That's on purpose. Sinclair is cheap and wants everything to look the same. They send a team out to every station to force all the directors to have the exact same lighting and camera settings on all equipment company wide. Everything looks muted and cheap and if the producers and directors want to change them for the better, they are threatened to be fired.

The Sinclair graphics package is also forced on all station which is followed with the same veiled threats.if I played the news theme for you here, it would sound like every Sinclair stations news.

https://youtu.be/gPMlUQjtPvw

Currently they own ROH Wrestling -- which has all the same problems of their news product listed above. Don't worry, they're selling it. Sinclair was trying to get into to sports broadcasting and created American Sports Network ASN and ROH was to be a part of it. it failed miserably.

They run extremely cheap and charge high ad prices which is why they have so much money to buy tribune. They are known to run stations into the ground just to have a footprint in a particular Market. Look at their St. Louis station abc30. They don't have an evening news, they hired conservative host Jamie Allman to do a 30 minute editorial show instead of news. It's bad. It's basically a local affiliate doing O'Reilly as their only news product.

They are creating syndicated programs to send to all of their stations to run very similar to Allman's show. Which is interesting because...

news directives by CEO David Smith. He once had a meeting with news directors where he asked everyone to focus their news content to be more like Afterburner. This leads to a bunch of other issues There's a video in the link below. Our news director said that he wants content to resemble this particular style which after seeing what you saw on Last Week Tonight proves he made it a corporate thing.

http://www.ftvlive.com/todays-news/2016/8/31/sinclair-ceo-goes-off

I realize that a lot of these behind the scenes stuff is really inside baseball for the common public. Sinclair runs like a monopoly and very soon they could be one of the largest media companies in America shaping the conversation.

I know there's a lot of people who say the media is liberal. But corporations own the media and you're going to have a hard time finding a liberal at the top of those companies. The local news production team might lean more left, but corporate dictates. It's hard to find the balance and it causes a lot of problems. Just know that most people who work in news, local news, try to cover the story as best and unbiased as they can. However, when you have a company like Sinclair who meddles with the news content, then you have a problem. This is a company with an agenda telling you what to think.
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just an all around horrible company
 
V

Volimar

Member
Laura Fucking Linney



In Columbus, Ohio Sinclair owns the local Fox and ABC news and rebroadcasts on the CW. I think the local CBS news (which I watch) is owned by Tribune. I'd really rather Sinclair didn't get their books into them.
 
O

otake

Doesn't know that "You" is used in both the singular and plural
I don't think Sinclair really has a political agenda. Their politics are revenue. They are buying tech and producing news stories at scale to lower cost. They have identified what will make the audience of their stations watch and it happens to be right wing programming. If the audience get's bored and stops watching, they will switch.

Sinclair cares about 1 thing only and it's selling ad inventory. Trump, republicans and terrorism only insofar as it helps them sell ad inventory.
 
J

Joeku

Member
otake said:
I don't think Sinclair really has a political agenda. Their politics are revenue. They are buying tech and producing news stories at scale to lower cost. They have identified what will make the audience of their stations watch and it happens to be right wing programming. If the audience get's bored and stops watching, they will switch.

Sinclair cares about 1 thing only and it's selling ad inventory. Trump, republicans and terrorism only insofar as it helps them sell ad inventory.
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That isn't news, though. Reporting on the skirting of hijab laws in France has fucking zero to do with terrorism. Having that on a "terrorism alert desk" segment is alarmist bullshit.
 
Vigilant Walrus

Vigilant Walrus

Member
Is it the same Tribune(new name tronc) that Oliver talked about in the previous episode about Journalism?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq2_wSsDwkQ

In this episode, what is so damming is what David Simon says about how political corruption will be massive without hard investigative journalism on the ground.
It doesn't make sense. We don't want to pay for it, and yet this is something that keeps people in our society in check. And because "fake news" is trending, there is a distrust of anything which leaves bad people open to engage in corruption.


This seems like a disaster in the making. I don't read my local newspaper. Why don't I? I really should.
But I have 5000 bookmarks of things to read and things I've saved for later.
This is incredible worrisome and depressing.
 
P

PHOENIXZERO

Member
Evil Monkey DTT said:
I looked up Sinclair in relation to where I live and jesus fuck, 2 out of the 3 local news stations are Sinclair. As if things couldn't be bad enough politically here.
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Yeah, I checked after I posted in the topic about this segment, I knew they owned my area Fox station but looking at the others they also own my area NBC and CW stations too through two different subsidiaries though they share studio space. At least there's still CBS and ABC though the former seems like it's dying or being killed by budget cuts.
 
M

morningbus

Serious Sam is a wicked gahbidge series for chowdaheads.
Volimar said:
Laura Fucking Linney

In Columbus, Ohio Sinclair owns the local Fox and ABC news and rebroadcasts on the CW. I think the local CBS news (which I watch) is owned by Tribune. I'd really rather Sinclair didn't get their books into them.
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PHOENIXZERO said:
Yeah, I checked after I posted in the topic about this segment, I knew they owned my area Fox station but looking at the others they also own my area NBC and CW stations too through two different subsidiaries though they share studio space. At least there's still CBS and ABC though the former seems like it's dying or being killed by budget cuts.
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The only silver lining to them buying Tribune in this case is that they will likely be required to sell off (or trade-off) a few of the stations in markets like yours. Even the loosest, pro-business, anti-consumer FCC probably won't be able to get around those regulations.
 
S

SeeThree

Member
Uh Alex Jones sells "Child Ease" designed to soothe the mind and bodies of children.
Some chocolate drink mix with bee pollen and the dust of chicken skeletons?
Taint wipes?

This shit pissed me off. I knew this goofy bastard did some sort of radio/internet freak show but I didn't know he spent so much time airtime selling his own junk.
 
J

Joeku

Member
SeeThree said:
Uh Alex Jones sells "Child Ease" designed to soothe the mind and bodies of children.
Some chocolate drink mix with bee pollen and the dust of chicken skeletons?
Taint wipes?

This shit pissed me off. I knew this goofy bastard did some sort of radio/internet freak show but I didn't know he spent so much time airtime selling his own junk.
Click to expand...

It's super basic huckster shit: tell people they have a problem, and then offer them the solution for a price. Unfortunately, it's on the goddamn Internet so it can reach more than a wagon rolling through a small town can, and the fucking current President is practically an advocate for it.
 
S

Shauni

Member
SeeThree said:
Uh Alex Jones sells "Child Ease" designed to soothe the mind and bodies of children.
Some chocolate drink mix with bee pollen and the dust of chicken skeletons?
Taint wipes?

This shit pissed me off. I knew this goofy bastard did some sort of radio/internet freak show but I didn't know he spent so much time airtime selling his own junk.
Click to expand...

That's like 90% of what Alex Jones does and has always done lol
 
C

CazTGG

Member
This week's episode was one of the best in the series ongoing run. The opening alone was a brutal response to Trump's response to the Charlottesville Nazi riot and that Weird Al song to close it out was impeccable.
 
C

CazTGG

Member
Dalek said:
Have you ever been aroused by the fairies in Zelda The Ocarina of Time?
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latest
 
A

Arkeband

Banned
Good episode, at least as far as the comedy is concerned - he introduced a few new running jokes, which also took the place of the formulaic "yells at kid with stupid name" pace breakers.
 
A

Azure Dream

Member
Cool, episodes are going on break. Again.

I know the show takes a lot of research and preparation, but calling them a "weekly" show is a pretty big stretch by now.
 
L

Loxley

Member
Ha, one of the news stations here in Milwaukee - WISN 12 - was in that montage of local news channels telling people not to stare at the sun XD
 
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