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Sinclair Broadcast Group: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

LastWeekTonight · 13.8M views · 2017-07-03 · 19:00

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Overview

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest owner of US local TV stations, and how it injects political content and scripted must-run segments into local news.

On Hacker News

HN repeatedly points to it as the eye-opening explanation of media consolidation and scripted local news.

Recommended by 10 HN people across 8 months · HN mentions 2017–2026

Topics

Media, journalism & propagandaTech industry & business models
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sinclairlocal newsmedia ownershipjohn oliverfcc

What people said

ShamelessC · 2020-07 · Strong recommendation

John Oliver did a good bit on them on Last Week Tonight, including dozens of supposedly local news stations repeating the exact same Sinclair script verbatim. Highly recommend. [VIDEO]

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WorldMaker · 2025-07 · Recommendation

Yeah in the US system thanks to some old competition requirements the Affiliate Network gets most of the name recognition and provides most of the prime time entertainment content (a few other content blocks), but the stations under that network have their own owners that can be more or less damaging, especially in news content, and more or less "invisible" in that maybe you only see their name in the fine print at the end of credits or copyright statements. One other notorious example is Sinclair Broadcasting [1]. Sinclair-owned stations include all of the major Affiliate Networks in the US and some of the minor ones, but are known for how much they farm politically-biased news content across their platforms, including trying to pass off editorial content as news content. (ETA: Which is to say that yeah a FOX affiliate gets entertainment programming from what is left of Rupert Murdoch's empire, but could be getting news content from all sorts of places from home-grown proper local journalism to content farms from their real owners.) [1] A humorous rant on it: [VIDEO]

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Quanttek · 2021-06 · Recommendation

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: [VIDEO] 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]: [LINK]

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Sources

Video by LastWeekTonight, played through YouTube.

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