The best piece of curated aggregation this year came from an unlikely source.
The mash-up of dozens of Sinclair broadcasters across the country reading from the same script — one denouncing all news but theirs as potentially “fake” even as they delivered the piece of propaganda in lockstep —came from the desk of Deadspin editor Timothy Burke, who apparently knocked it out in a fit of righteous citizenship before getting back to breaking sports news, making slam-dunk compilations and generating lists about why your favorite team sucks.
The widespread dissemination of this bullshit comprises the first offensive maneuver in what is slowly morphing into an all-out war against the legitimate press, waged from behind the safety of an alternate universe provided by pretenders and grifters.
This war started long ago, with the formation of Fox News in 1996. But action in this particular theater — the public airwaves — began when Sinclair Broadcasting amassed more than 200 network-television affiliate stations across the United States. They’ve got two in this market, one of which is ABC affiliate WXLV at channel 45.
And make no mistake: This is a war, one not of missiles and bullets but of information and fact, and it’s just getting started.
Coordinating with the Sinclair piece of puppetry, two of the five tweets President Trump issued on Tuesday concerned the “Fake News Networks” and “Little Jeff Zuker [sic].” Surely he is not done yet.
Later on Tuesday, David Smith, who is executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group and who sounds like he has a fake name, told New York magazine that the print media — the entire enterprise — “serves no real purpose,” has “no credibility” and “generally [a] complete lack of integrity.”
The claim is the same one peddled by every commander at the helm of an unjust war, every grifter who is trying to pull off an unusually large con, or every philandering partner who wants to continue their cheating ways: Everybody is lying to you but us.
And it’s what usually happens right before the house of cards collapses.
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