The Deadspin compilation of local Sinclair TV anchors across the U.S. reciting a scripted, mandatory, hard-right mea culpa for journalism is perhaps the most frightening Orwellian performance since the McCarthy witch hunts 60 years ago. Their boss, who hates journalists, made them do it.

My subject is coercion. Who were these people speaking in eerie harmony as each video was combined? Did they go along to get along, the key moral question of this era? Did they disgrace themselves in service to their children and mortgages? I would refuse to write bland sugar-water columns to keep myself safe. I hope.

As the comedian John Oliver put it, “Nothing says ‘We value independent media’ like dozens of reporters forced to repeat the same message over and over again like members of a brainwashed cult.”

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I thought they were a spoken-word choir or indeed Choir! Choir! Choir! Perhaps they were an American cheerleader squad pledging allegiance to their school, or a corporate retreat that went too far.

Trump was bouncingly happy. “Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke,” he tweeted. Sinclair owns 193 stations in 39 states. No wonder Trump is cheerful.

When reporters contacted David Smith, executive chairman of Sinclair, he responded with incandescent anger. “The print media is so left wing as to be meaningless dribble which accounts for why the industry is and will fade away.”

So hard-right Sinclair bullied its helpless staff in much the same way that three members of the hard left of Wilfrid Laurier University bullied a young student, Lindsay Shepherd. How awkward.

The Sinclair script was lengthy but this particular section was remarkable: “More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories — stories that just aren’t true — without checking facts first,” the anchors, alone or in pairs, declared in that loud, enunciated, urgent native to American TV news. “Unfortunately, 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 a democracy.”

Indeed.

The anchors urged viewers to complain to management if they didn’t like the reporting that the anchors were introducing. In other words, staffers were begging viewers to get them fired. That is real Cultural Revolution stuff, when China’s Red Guards would gather around an innocent, beat him, humiliate him, and force him to confess to his own wrongness, then send him off to distant slavery and/or re-education camp.

WMSN/FOX 47 in Madison, Wisc. refused to air the scripted reading. Their courage despite group pressure fascinates me.

I have written before about the most distressing group photo I’ve ever seen. It was in a Found Photography exhibition at the Paris Maison Européenne de la Photographie in 2011, a silver print photograph taken at a Vienna birth clinic in 1939.

It shows 16 tiny newborns swaddled in white, placed on a white floor cloth, two infants head-to-toe per segment, and arranged to form a living breathing Nazi swastika. I posted it online and quickly deleted it after I realized that people might take offence.

And I don’t post it now for a different reason. It would be too popular. The new public tide of open neo-Nazis and white supremacists would love that snapshot.

The Anschluss had taken place the year before, in 1938. Austrians largely welcomed the Nazis and were doubtless scrambling to impress Hitler. Who ordered the photo taken? Did staff approve? Did parents know? Were they given wallet-size copies? Did any unwise parents object?

If the babies were Jewish, which I somehow doubt, they would have been gassed or sent for medical experiments, for some Viennese children’s clinics and hospitals provided that service. We’ll never know.

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The Trump Administration makes lists, collects names, and may even use census info to track immigrants as the U.S. did in 1940 to arrest Japanese-American citizens. It was illegal but was done anyway.

The key in all these scenes of coercion — mass humiliation, the targeting of individuals, the currying of favour — is that it’s best to protest from the start and to fight in groups, as the brave Parkland students did on gun control. Acquiesce and you’re doomed.

Correction - April 30, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly referred to Parkland students as Lakeland students.

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