Public Notice's Sinclair report makes national headlines

From Morning Joe to the HuffPost, it's been a big week for the newsletter.

As part of a collaboration with Judd Legum of Popular Information, earlier this week I published a report on Sinclair’s right-wing media empire and how it’s using its reach across American TV markets to inject deceptive attacks on Joe Biden into local news.

A surreal video I put together of local anchors reading from the same script tells the story. Watch it below, and you can read the full article here.

We anticipated our piece would generate some buzz, but the response surpassed my expectations. In addition to writeups by (among others) the HuffPost, New Republic, and Mediate, our work was the focus of a Morning Joe segment yesterday.

"It's really not local reporting. It's spoon-fed from a right-wing leadership group that's spreading disinformation,” Joe Scarborough said, summarizing the problem with Sinclair. (Watch the full segment below.)

Our reporting was also featured Tuesday evening on Alex Wagner Tonight in a segment that featured context about how Sinclair pulled a similar stunt in 2018. (Watch below.)

Sinclair ended up taking so much heat thanks to our report that they released a statement saying “the allegation Sinclair is deceiving its audience or spreading disinformation is outrageous and offensive.” That non-denial was a topic of discussion when Judd joined Wagner for an interview last night. (Watch below.)

Suffice it to say that it’s gratifying to see our work exposing the right-wing misinformation machine being amplified by outlets and personalities I respect, especially at a time when people should be keyed in on the dirty tricks reactionary tycoons are using to help Trump return to power.

But doing journalism of this sort takes time and resources. It took half a day just to comb through dozens of Sinclair broadcasts for the clips I needed to tell the story, not to mention the additional time it took to actually produce the video. The service I use to access recordings of local news telecasts throughout the country costs thousands of dollars a year. And this project, like everything I do, was funded entirely by paid subscribers.

So if you aren’t already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. Paid subscriptions come with a bunch of perks, including full access to everything we publish on the site, commenting privileges, access to Q&As with me, and more. And they also provide me with the resources I need to keep doing impactful journalism. To sign up, just click the button below.

Longtime readers know I don’t toot my own horn very often in this newsletter, but our Sinclair piece making national headlines feels like a fitting opportunity for it. And while being featured on MSNBC may not be a daily occurrence, I’m extremely proud of the work we do week in and week out here in Public Notice explaining the crazy world of US politics.

Thanks for reading. And thanks for supporting our independent journalism.

We’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

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UPDATE: After this newsletter was published, I learned that our reporting was also the focus of a lengthy segment on Joy Reid’s show yesterday. You can watch it below.

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