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Have you seen a second- or third-hand version of the Breitbart News headline “Alabama ABC affiliate can’t find one voter who believes WAPO report about Roy Moore in man on the street segment”? As Baltimore Sun reporter David Zurawik detailed on CNN, there’s something you should know about that ABC affiliate and that man on the street segment.
It’s a Sinclair-owned station. There’s an echo chamber being created here, and because it’s a Sinclair-owned station in Alabama, it has the credibility of being local.
Now, what it amounted to was four people being interviewed by a young reporter, versus the 30 people who were interviewed on the Washington Post. [...] That echo chamber is one of the big stories of this year, that right-wing echo chamber, and it’s at work on this story.
When you think “can’t find one voter who believes the story,” do you think four interviews? That’s … not trying very hard.
But as Zurawik identifies, one of the things that makes Sinclair dangerous is that it owns local stations, so its propaganda feels more authentic, while being harder to identify—Sinclair products don’t come with a big Sinclair label on them a la Fox News. They come labeled ABC or CBS or NBC, so they’re pulling credibility both from a national affiliation and from a local home. Then their work gets grabbed up by Breitbart to circulate in the far-right echo chamber. And they’re trying to grow and spread their poison further.