The champagne corks were flying at MSNBC last week when for the first time in the history of cable news, a relatively new medium, MSNBC beat Fox News in primetime for an entire week. Details from PoliticusUSA:
For the first time in the network’s 21-year history, MSNBC finished the week as the most-watched cable network during weekday prime (M-F 8-11pm) in total viewers. According to Nielsen, MSNBC ended the week of July 17-21 as the #1 cable network for all weekday prime, averaging 2.34 million viewers, ahead of FOX News at 2.25 million. MSNBC was previously #1 in cable news in weekday prime during the weeks of May 15, 2017 (behind TNT) and September 3, 2012 (behind USA) among total viewers, but this was the 1st time MSNBC was #1 among all of cable.
Additionally, MSNBC’s 7 pm through midnight lineup was the #1 cable network in total viewers.
Here is the list of top 5 networks for the week via Nielson:
1. MSNBC 2.335
2. FOXNC 2.250
3. DSNY 1.740
4. USA 1.569
4. HGTV 1.518
The rise of MSNBC is attributed in large part to the networks primetime coverage of the Trump Russia scandal. Now before you get too excited about the image of Fake News Fox swirling the drain, Bloomberg Businessweek has a lengthy must-read article on how a little known media mogul named David Smith, “The biggest name you never heard of in media,” according to former FCC Chair Michael Kopps, operating out of his modest flagship station in Baltimore, is ready to out-Fox Fox News by creating the Fox News equivalent of conservative media in local stations across the country with the proposed acquisition of Tribune Broadcasting this fall. Read these excerpts and try not to weep:
In the menagerie of television talking heads who have come to prominence advocating for Donald Trump, Boris Epshteyn is hardly the most memorable. He lacks Sean Spicer’s flair for the absurd, Kellyanne Conway’s gift at turning a phrase (“alternative facts”), Corey Lewandowski’s smoldering menace, Jeffrey Lord’s Zen inertia, or Sebastian Gorka’s staunch facial hair. Nobody has parodied Epshteyn on Saturday Night Live. Yet he’s perhaps the best surrogate to study if you want to understand where the Trump/TV industrial complex goes next.
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Epshteyn briefly worked in the White House—the job ended not long after Politico reported that he’d gotten into a “yelling match” with a booker at Fox News—but since April he’s been employed as the chief political analyst for the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Located in Hunt Valley, Md., little-known Sinclair is the nation’s largest owner of broadcast TV stations. It has 173 of them, mostly in small markets (Sioux City, Iowa; Fresno, Calif.; Little Rock), but with several in larger metropolitan areas as well (Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Washington). Whatever a particular station’s network affiliation—ABC, CBS, CW, Fox, or NBC—Sinclair viewers get a steady dose of conservative political commentary. Lately, Executive Chairman David Smith has begun assembling a kind of junior varsity squad of commentators and making unspecific murmurings about competing head-to-head with the senior lettermen and women at Fox News. To left-leaning viewers only just becoming aware of the company’s reach, Sinclair is positioned to flip a switch and turn those 173 stations’ newscasts—currently delivering bulletins on weather, school closings, and local affairs—into a cohesive network that pushes a Fox News-esque worldview of outrage and conflict into individual cities, counties, and towns.
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Epshteyn shows how the arrangement might work. Three times a week he records brief video commentaries that are sent to Sinclair’s 65 or so newsrooms around the country. Station managers are required to weave them into their otherwise locally produced news shows—part of a larger daily slate of clips known internally as “must-runs.” In recent segments, Epshteyn has praised the Trump administration’s trade policies, encouraged states to cooperate with his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, critiqued Democrats’ lack of a “coherent and authentic” message, and knocked other news outlets for their insufficiently admiring coverage of Trump.
[...]
Epshteyn’s low-budget shtick, often delivered in front of a graphic image of the White House overladen with the stars and stripes, hasn’t wowed critics. One, David Zurawik, wrote in the Baltimore Sun that Epshteyn’s “commentary has come as close to classic propaganda as anything I have seen in broadcast television in the last 30 years.”
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Sinclair is likely to get larger yet. In May the company announced it was buying Tribune Media Co. for $3.9 billion. Among other assets, Sinclair would add 42 TV stations—including major ones in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—if the deal is approved by regulators. The expansion wouldn’t have been possible if Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, hadn’t voted a few weeks earlier to ease a major restriction on local media ownership.
While future-of-media gurus have long predicted the death of broadcast TV, roughly 20 million U.S. households don’t subscribe to a cable, satellite, or streaming TV package and still rely on local stations for news and entertainment. Many more viewers, whether they know it or not, also consume Sinclair programming via their cable or satellite providers, which pay Sinclair to retransmit their content. The more the company grows, the more leverage it holds over networks, syndicators, advertisers—and politicians, who continue to lean heavily on local TV to get their message out. Last year, Sinclair generated $256 million of net income on $2.7 billion of revenue. (It also has $4 billion in debt.) But the recent growth has sharpened a conflict at the heart of the company, pitting Smith’s desire to build a national media powerhouse on par with the likes of Comcast Corp. and Walt Disney Co. against his tendency to penny-pinch and cut corners.
David Smith is indeed the most powerful man in media that you never heard of. His dream is not a modest one either, to become a media powerhouse of the likes of Sony, Comcast, Disney and less than a handful of others who own and control most of the media outlets in the entire country. Smith started out modestly in broadcasting. He was a partner in Cine Processors, a company which reproduced pornographic films in bulk, and with that seed money Smith and his father acquired a small Baltimore television station, WBFF in the early '70's. They went on from there to taking the company public back in 1995 and owning 59 stations by the end of the 90's. In 2002 Sinclair began original programming.
For years, Sinclair shied from creating original programming. That changed in 2002, when it launched a news operation in Hunt Valley. Executives said “News Central” would create national reports that would be sent to its stations, saving money on duplicative newsgathering efforts. Sinclair executives also saw an opportunity to make local news more provocative. “Fox News Channel has demonstrated that people want a different level of truth,” Smith told Adweek. “And if you can do it nationally, why not locally? If we’re successful in creating meaningful, relevant controversy, we’ll be doing a community service.”
There's little difference between "a different level of truth" and "alternative facts." Smith also hasn't found it necessary to worry overmuch about such tried and true journalistic axioms as news and advertising are two separate categories of information. He freely produces a mixture of both in defiance of ethics, not to mention straightforward broadcast regulations.
The apparent blurring of news and advertising was no anomaly. Sinclair newscasts tend to be rife with paid consideration. One morning in 2015, Candace Dold, a reporter for Sinclair’s Fox affiliate in Baltimore, tossed a live segment to the station’s roving reporter, Jimmy Uhrin, aka “Traffic Jam Jimmy”—who was seemingly caught unprepared as he passed through a McDonald’s drive-through and tried to order a fish sandwich. “I didn’t know we were coming live, I’m sorry,” said Jimmy. “Anyways, don’t tell the boss I did this.” The clip went viral as an amusing blooper, racking up more than 1.6 million views on YouTube. According to a former employee, however, the whole thing was staged as part of an advertising deal with McDonald’s Corp.—something that was never disclosed to viewers. (Traffic Jam Jimmy declined to comment.) In an email to the Baltimore Sun in 2015, the station’s general manager denied that the segment had been paid for by McDonald’s.
Playing fast and loose with advertising is a matter not just of ethics, but of broadcast regulations. Around January 2016, Sinclair stations across the U.S. began inserting must-runs celebrating the Huntsman Cancer Institute, a research and treatment facility in Salt Lake City, into their regular programming. They were supposed to disclose that the spots were paid promotions, not genuine news. But the ads aired for months on many stations without any such notice, in repeated violation of federal guidelines. Eventually, someone tipped off the FCC. Ripley says the company has since instituted safeguards to prevent anything similar from happening again. “We eliminated the possibility of human error and put the right disclosures in,” he says.
Smith is apparently happy to pay FCC fines as long as he can get what he wants. Spend whatever it takes to win is his motto. Right now what he wants is for Sinclair to buy Tribune, which is the largest conglomerate of local stations in the country. With the addition of those 42 stations, Sinclair would then have ownership of stations in seven out of the ten largest media markets in the country, including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Sinclair has determined that national news is an overcrowded field, but that local news is ripe for the plucking. And there are plans to branch out into other forms of unscripted programming such as talk shows, court shows and game shows.
After Trump won, the FCC voted in April to restore an arcane rule that paved the way for Sinclair to buy Tribune. (The deal is still under government review.) Sinclair’s expansion looks breezy compared with another media merger: AT&T Inc.’s pending bid for Time Warner Inc., the parent company of CNN. In July, according to the New York Times, White House officials were privately discussing how they could use the deal to tame CNN’s critical coverage of the president.
Frightening to think that the government could so blatantly control what goes out on the public airwaves but that is precisely what is being contemplated, a shift in journalistic reality so huge that the airwaves would be no longer considered the domain of the public but the domain of corporations and stockholders, free to proselytize the company line, whatever it might be, and to abrogate all journalistic norms, because now they own the medium, not the people. So if you were just feeling warm and cozy about MSNBC beating out Fox, think again. We may have won the battle but we are nowhere near winning the war.