Print journalists tend to think (smugly) of our TV brethren — but especially anchors who never venture into the field — as talking heads.

Rip ’n‘ read. Or just read the teleprompter. Anybody can do it.

Talking in unison, though, is a new one on me.

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Totalitarian unison, as has been described of a spliced piece of footage brilliantly assembled by Timothy Burke, video director at Deadspin, the sports news and blog website. The video has gone viral, racking up more than six million views on Twitter over the weekend.

Dozens of local television station anchors reciting the same manifesto mantra to their combined millions of American viewers last month. Brings to mind that feel-good roll-credits ending from romcom flick Love, Actually, of people greeting each other at the airport, a checkerboard montage of hugs, multiplying to fill the entire screen.

The lockstep propagandizing of the “must-read” script, as dictated by cable oligopoly Sinclair Broadcast Group — largest broadcaster in the U.S., owning or operating 193 television stations — can only be truly appreciated by watching the stitched together Deadspin version. All those voices assaulting the eardrums. A kind of anchor Gregorian chant.

The echo chamber goes like this, in part:

“The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.”

“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.”

So true. And couldn’t be better illustrated than by the massaged messaging content Sinclair force-marched over the airwaves by anchors who looked and sounded like hostages delivering a proof-of-life statement written by their captors. Have to feel sorry for those men and women dragooned into spreading the gospel because their jobs probably depended on acquiescence. Far as I could find out, only one station refused to do so.

The eerie a cappella smackdown of other media allegedly pumping fake news — straight from President Donald Trump’s liturgy — was first noted by CNN’s chief media analyst Brian Stelter, who got his hands on an internal Sinclair memo ordering its stations to produce and broadcast the “anchor-delivered” one-minute decreed script.

Backlash has been fast and furious. The props from the White House were predictable. Trump tweet, Monday morning: “So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased. Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke.”

It’s become a tedious exercise, quoting Trump’s tweets. What the president failed to mention is that some of the stations owned or operated by Sinclair are NBC affiliates and ABC affiliates and CBS affiliates and — the cable juggernaut beloved of Trump — Fox affiliates, so they were indirectly in on the spin. But of course Trump is an idiot.

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Media giant Sinclair is at least equal to Fox in its right wing agenda-pushing aspirations. Based just outside Baltimore, Sinclair’s stations are clustered in predominantly conservative areas of America, according to an analysis of the company’s markets by the Washington Post, territory where voters opted for Trump over Clinton by a 19-point margin, on average. Sinclair regularly sends video segments to the stations it owns — they’re actually called “must-runs” — with content such as “terrorism news updates” and commentators speaking in support of Trump. Sinclair has also been accused of using its connections to the Trump administration to ease regulations on media consolidation. During the 2016 election campaign, the company sought and was granted exceptional access to Trump in exchange for airing the candidate’s interviews sans commentary.

It was in league with the Swift Boat movement that helped sink John Kerry’s presidential bid in 2004, airing parts of a documentary — Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal days before the election. It broadcast an infomercial that claimed president Barack Obama may have received campaign funds from Hamas.

In a further twist of corporate wrangling, Sinclair earlier this year, as reported by the Washington Post, asked in an employee solicitation letter to executives — including news directors at many of its TV stations — for contributions to its own political action committee.

Most media companies expressly forbid that kind of partisan alignment. But the whole industry has been turned on its head by social media encroachment — we’ve fallen into bed with the monster via digital platforms — and many lines distinguishing editorial from sponsored pap have been blurred.

It’s unfathomable to me why conservatives, down there and up here, insist they’re getting the media shaft when so much of what we read, see and hear cleaves to a wildly right-wing narrative. Politically, in the U.S., the conservative establishment (and reactionary non-establishment) holds just about all the cards right now. And still they whine, taking their cue from the whiner-in-chief.

Newspapers, all media, have been taking it on the nose, especially since Big Media got it so drastically wrong in the last U.S. election. Distrust, coupled with the disdain shown towards a disaffected and disgruntled electorate — the “deplorables,” remember? — has brought those of us who report the news into unprecedented disrepute, a lesson not well learned, sadly. Yet apparently local TV news has bucked the trend. According to a Pew Research Center study, 85 per cent of Americans trust local news — more than they trust family and friends.

Sinclair hasn’t been remotely chastened by the decreed anchor-speak bashing from media analysts, doubling down on its criticism of (insert local anchor here, speaking), “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country.” From the company’s senior vice-president of news in a statement released Monday: “We aren’t sure of the motivation for the criticism, but find it curious that we would be attacked for asking our news people to remind their audiences that unsubstantiated stories exist on social media, which result in an ill-informed public with potentially dangerous consequences.

Misinformed and Manchurian-ed is apparently preferable.

Sinclair may have its obvious conservative tilt but there’s something more greasy in play here: Money and profit.

The company is seeking federal regulatory approval for its proposed $3.9 billion acquisition of Tribune Media Co. That deal would make Sinclair a media conglomerazilla, with 233 stations in 108 markets, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, where it has no presence now. Control of Tribune-owned WGN America alone means reaching 80 million homes.

Federal Communications Commission rules currently limit single station owners from reaching 39 per cent of the national television audience but Sinclair is pushing for deregulation and, as has been reported, FCC chair Ajit Pai met with Sinclair executives mere days before he was named to the job.

A fan in the White House: priceless.

Rosie DiManno is a columnist based in Toronto covering sports and current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno

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