And some links for anyone who wants to see more about these topics...

Sinclair Broadcasting owns local stations, most likely at least one near you: http://sbgi.net/tv-stations/

Scripps I believe is a bit smaller, but also owns a lot of local stations: https://scripps.com/our-brands/local-media/

So if Sinclair and Scripps both run the same newswire story, for instance, that is a country full of people getting it through their local -- often "most trusted" -- news station. A lot of stations get the "final say" on what does and doesn't run, but sometimes they do not.

Wikipedia entry for "Video news release": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_news_release

Wikipedia entry for "Satellite media tour": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_media_tour

And finally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_literacy

Yup; don't ever believe any news outlets is independent, they are often owned by a single entity. In the UK for example, most media is owned by News Corp., aka Rupert Murdoch. They have the power to change the narrative and public opinion, and with that, sway elections in their favor.

I feel like politics nowadays is not so much a fight between politicians, but between corporations with conflicting interests and the handful of people at the top behind them, and the parties paying them (including foreign powers).

> most media is owned by News Corp

This I'm afraid isn't true, though it may feel like it.

None of the free-to-air TV channels are owned by News Corp, which remains the purview of BBC and ITV in the main. It has minimal investment in radio stations. It has The Sun, The Times and Sunday Times. It used to have the News of the World.

It doesn't have the Mail, Express, Independent, Guardian, Mirror etc.

In terms of revenue globally, the top five are: AT&T, Comcast, Disney, ViacomCBS, and Fox. The are mainstream media oligopolies in most countries these days, but the beauty of the internet is that independent journalists and voices who have been shut-out and banned from the corporate-establishment fold like Ralph Nader and Chris Hedges can still find tiny soap-boxes to speak truth to power since almost no one else is doing it. Then there's people like Jimmy Dore who will never get taken seriously by the establishment because he doesn't have the wealth, pedigree, or entitled rich-dbag attitude to be let into their club.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...

Competing brands of hegemonic, despotic, inverted totalitarian feudal lords vying for the Iron Throne. Bezos may ultimately be the first trillionaire as Tim Cook has clearly ran out of gas and is piloting a doomed A380 dinosaur into the drink. Ultimately, I think the first trillionaire will probably be Chinese because of China's rapid and potentially-large and long-lasting ascendancy.

Ultimately, it is and always will be a powerful few who have too much against the many who have too little.

Tim Cook isn't even a billionaire.... and Bezes only has a 1/10 of a Trillion, which is still many orders of magnitude more than Cook.

If your were instead talking about the coorporations they lead, they have been trillion dollar companies for a long time. And Apple is enjoying ts best years.

A video about Sinclair from Last Week Tonight With John Oliver[0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc

Doesn’t much news involve heavy ... collusion with the subject of or source of the story?

Having it completely produced by the subject isn’t a big leap from the current situation with many publishers and reporters.

There seems to be very little news which isn’t engineered to benefit one group or another. In other words real, objective, and independent reporting seems to be quite rare, and the mistaken expectation that most news is exactly that seems to be very common.

>There seems to be very little news which isn’t engineered to benefit one group or another.

I'll go further and say a lot of "news" is just activism, pushing a political agenda. In some cases it's blatantly obvious, and in some cases it's not, and you have to dig a little deeper to find out. It's starting to become a problem in Denmark as well, because most american trends make their way here on a time delay - good or bad.

Eh, I wouldn't lean on it that much. Yes, a significant factor, but activism or its appearance is in many ways more an effect of finding and cultivating an audience and optimizing for their attention, and ultimately things like advertising dollars and social media likes and such.

I think there is this insidious link between people's opinions and "biased" news coverage where they are both spontaneously emerging and evolving and in effect causing one another specifically not being driven by an external activist idealism but emerging from the motivation to make money and get attention - which I think is much more dangerous and scary than if the news was being driven by some intentional agenda. Like it's this organism or disease which is evolving to take maximum advantage of human weaknesses, on one side of the publisher for the needs and rewards of money and approval, on the side of the consumer for what grabs attentions, builds loyalty, and shapes opinions. It's this monster that is shaping the human world out of control.

It is also possible that it is 2am and I have been watching too much Ghost in the Shell.

This is a pretty cynical take. I think most (not all, but most) news organizations are trying to produce ethical, truthful news free of bias and conflicts of interest.

Cynical – I don't like the adjective, turning a school of philosophy poorly understood into a generic term for being overly negative implying that negativity comes from ignorance...

My point being, I'm not just guessing. Seeing the sausage being made a few times is enlightening.

Then the questions about what motivations the reporter and source had making up every story you read become obvious and pervasive and "truth" "relevance" and "ethics" just don't seem to be at the top. Not that those things are completely ignored, just not at the top for everyone involved just looking out for their best interests. You don't have to be wildly corrupt for everybody to have each others best interests as their own best interests and what you get is mostly useless news consisting of people cheerleading for each other and some cause which isn't anywhere near that set of ideals.

That’s not at all what “cynical” means. From Merriam-Webster: “contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives.”

I intended exactly that meaning. Not “being overly negative.”

And your response solidifies my diagnosis. Do you permit no noble actions by mankind? Is all corrupt, inept, perverted? That way of looking at the world is poison.

What books or literature do you suggest to learn more about making these sausages?

One book in particular comes to mind:

Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

While the titular premise of the book is compelling and contains (and in part inspired) many of my opinions on the subject, I also found it baffling and infuriating biased version of (at the time) recent history it presented even though I am generally politically aligned with the presented bias. It seemed in extremely bad taste to write a book about media bias containing so much of its own biased version of history. I had to put it down several times and never finished it. At the same time, it is 32 years old and the landscape has changed very much.

Still quite good.

Watch The West Wing and The Newsroom, both headed by Aaron Sorkin, both fiction, but based on quite a lot of real world research in the White House and newsrooms. (while perhaps being at times a bit overly ham-fisted about their own ideals)

Otherwise, a bit of a ridiculous suggestion, get a job in the PR department of a small company or a news organization ... or make a close acquaintance with somebody who has one.

I am not sure that anybody has written the book that everybody needs to read on the subject. It would take a lot of guts and self-awareness for someone to write a memoir about their own biases or behaviours on the subject, and for people coming from the outside it would be difficult to come at the subject without more than a hint of confirming their pre-existing ideas, especially in these days of the "fake news" culture war where neither side of the political divide seems particularly interested in nuanced truth.

Here's an easy example of "news", imagine how and why the following was written. Imagine the people involved, what their motivations are, the past present, and future of the relationships between them.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/26/zipline-begins-us-medical-...

In short: I don't have any great recommendations of one thing to grok the situation.

I started a project to track news articles across various sites, the idea was to get multiple takes on the same subject and ideally a more informed, less partisan view.

It uh, did not pan out. Most news sites publish nearly identical articles, stuff them with ads and affiliate links and fill in the dots with a few low brow opinion pieces catered to the audience for that site.

Pretty depressing discovery on my part.

It isn't. It's reality. It's actually naive to think that news organizations are trying to produce ethical, truthful news free of bias and conflicts of interest.

Pick any news organization and go read its history. Who created it and why it was created. No news organization was created to produce ethical, truthful news free of bias and conflicts of interest. They were all created to push a political/economic agenda - aka propaganda.

But online there are legal requirements around marking ads as ads. Is there no such law for televised news?

Ah, but what's the definition of advertising? Probably requires the station to get paid, right? So what happens if the station airs the segment the company produced for free because it lets them be lazy and not hire as many reporters to fill their airtime?

It actually becomes a tough line to draw, because a lot of huge conglomerates own media organizations. If you carry a coronavirus story produced by ABC, do you have to regard it as advertising because ABC is owned by Disney and the virus severely impacts their theme parks?

The FCC’s advertising disclosure rules apply to every form of broadcast media.

The true fake news