The Growth of Sinclair’s Conservative Media Empire: A Review

The Growth of Sinclair’s Conservative Media Empire: A Review
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The Growth of Sinclair’s Conservative Media Empire: A Review
The article titled “The Growth of Sinclair’s Conservative Media Empire” written by Sheelah Kolhatkar and published in the New Yorker discusses how the Sinclair Broadcast Group has gained prominence over the years and how it is being used to push the political agendas of the Republicans. The author supports her point of view by quoting prominent figures in the public sphere. For instance, she quotes a tweet by Dan Rather, a former CBS evening news anchor who said that “News anchors looking into the camera and reading a script handed down by a corporate overlord, words meant to obscure the truth not elucidate it, isn’t journalism…(Kolhatkar, 2018).” This quote is meant to strengthen her position that Sinclair is using journalists to push for their libertarian philosophy. Also, she refers to other articles that have been written in the past. For instance, while discussing how Sinclair was able to circumvent regulation on the ownership of broadcasting stations, she refers to a 1998 article published in Forbes Magazine. Other sources that she has mentioned in her article include the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun. She also uses a first-person and third-person point of view while describing what happened. Switching from first-person to third-person allows her to differentiate between her opinion and information provided to her by experts or other individuals who were a source of information for her story.
There are many claims in the article and it is important to check their validity and reliability. First, I cross-checked the information provided in the article with other popular news outlets. Interestingly, other news outlets such as The Guardian (Graves, 2017), The Washington Post (Rosenberg, 2018), and Vox (Matthews, 2018) have published articles that provide the same information about Sinclair and its conservativeness. This much publication of articles with similar information gives validity to the article under review. Also, the New Yorker, where the article under review was published, has been ranked “high” in factual reporting and it has never failed a fact check (Media Bias/ Fact Check, n.d.). This gives some validity to the outlet and thereby, the article itself. Further, the author, Sheelah Kolhatkar, is a staff writer at the New Yorker and as such, her affiliations to a credible online news outlet give validity to her claims.
The author uses a well-developed timeline to describe the issue at hand. To develop this timeline, she starts by highlighting when Sinclair was founded and how it has grown over the years to be one of the largest television broadcasting companies in the US. She also emphasizes on events that have had the greatest impact, such as F.C.C regulation that prohibited ownership of two stations within the same market...