Sinclair Sounds Like An Evil Place To Work

A still from that Sinclair News Group "hostage video" in which anchors
at local television stations were ordered to read a pro-Trump fake news
script to their viewers. 

I'm sure many of you have heard the hue and cry about Sinclair.... the parent company of  lot of local television stations who forced all those local anchors to parrot Donald Trump's "fake news" talking points. (read: lies.)

This was made wildly famous earlier this month by that viral video that came from Deadspin of all those anchors from Sinclair-owned stations being forced to read a "hostage video" script about how every news outlet except Sinclair, supposedly, is biased fake news.

You can see this video for yourself at the bottom of this post. I'll quote a key line from the video.

"Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control 'exactly what people think'.......This is extremely dangerous to a democracy."

So instead, the Sinclair Trumpian overlords used their corporate platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control what the people think - which is extremely dangerous to a democracy.

But, whatever.

Sinclair owns 193 local television stations and is looking to buy many more, apparently in an effort to sell their right wing bullshit at the expense of accurate local news. And since there are often no local alternatives for viewers, Sinclair believes they can brainwah the viewing public.

Besides all this awful stuff, Sinclair sounds like a terrible, terrible, place to work.

First of all, most journalists, certainly including local television journalists, pride themselves on accurate,  hard-hitting reporting that is unbiased as humanly possible.

I was in journalism for year. I get it. We all have our biases, opinions and slants. We're human beings after all. But from Journalism 101 and on through my 20-year career as a reporter, it was always ingrained in me to follow the fact where they led, question everything, be skeptical and do everything I could to purge my internal biases from my reporting.

A group of Sinclair local anchors wrote about their outrage about being forced to read the script in a Vox article last week:

"For many of us, that was the death knell. The perception among much of the public was that Sinlar was Trump TV. Now it felt like that perception was a reality. Had Trump's seal of approval put is in the same camp as Infowars and Fox News? This was a place many Sinclair journalists never expected, or wanted to be in. 

A station we've cared about for many years has been stripped of its credibility. The station lost longtime viewers - and respect from the community, its most important asset. And we Sinclair employees have lost respect for our jobs."

So why don't these Sinclair journalists just quit and find work somewhere else?

The answer gets into why Sinclair is such an evil company for employees. The anonymous Sinclair journalists writing for Vox were anonymous knew that if their names became public, Sinclair would fire them, and worse, make them pay back the corporation thousands of dollars.

That's right.

Various versions of Sinclair employee contracts leaked to the media show that employees who quit the company might be subject to "liquidated damages" which would make them pay Sinclair up to 40 percent of their annual paycheck as penalty.

Now, most television stations, and many companies in general have a non-compete clause.  You'd be restricted from working for a direct competitor, and if you do, your former company can demand money.

But some Sinclair employees, like Jonathan Beaton, quit his job at Sinclair-owned WPEC and took a new job by starting up a public relations firm, which is not in competition with Sinclair or WPEC.

As the Daily Beast and other news outlets point out, this Sinclair contract could well be iffy from a legal standpoint.

"This liquidated damages clause seems highly problematic......In general, such clauses are not enforceable if they are simply punitive; they have to be reasonable attempts to capture likely damages. In the employment contact, this is very unusual," Samuel Estreicher of the Center for Employment Law and New York University told the Daily Beast. 

Former Sinclair employees could then conceivably fight the company in court, but most don't want to invest money and time they don't have for a legal fight.  That's why the anchors in the above-mentioned Vox article want to remain anonymous.

Beaton, though, IS fighting in court.

And, demonstrating how badly Sinclair is into controlling employees, the company is trying to claw back $5,700 for the part of Beaton's unfinished contract. Beaton, writing in HuffPost, tells us he's fighting it. 

First of all Beaton tells us why he quit the Sinclair owned station:

"As reporters and anchors at the company, we were routinely told to follow leads and angles with a clear-cut conservative agenda. At  CBS-12,  (WEPC) I was ordered to do man-on-the-street interviews that were clearly politically biased. I'd ask loaded questions like, 'How much do you disagree with Obama this year?' 

It was disguised as real journalism. The funny thing is, I'm a Republican - and I was still pissed by it. But it was more than just the questions. It was stories we were told to do. They often had to have a religious tie-in. We couldn't do stories, for the most part, that involved the LGBTQ community. There were a set of parameters and we had to stick to them."

So much for Sinclair's anchor hostage tape supposedly decrying fake or biased news, huh?

You'd think a corporation making a profit of $443.5 million in its latest quarterly earnings wouldn't spend a lot of time and litigation trying to get $5,700. But you'd be wrong.

"Sinclair argues that I caused them irreparable harm by leaving. Believe me, I was a good reporter, but not that good," Beaton says.

Of course, there's a larger goal here on the part of Sinclair. Make an example out of Beaton and nobody else will quit. But as Beaton puts it, "I refuse to cower and acquiesce to this malevolent corporation. I'm fighting back."

Good. I'm glad to see some rebellions starting againt Sinclair. If anything good came out of the "hostage video," it's the attention it brought.

Fourteen journalism schools have come out critcizing Sinclair. Budding journalists have been put on notice not to apply for jobs at Sinclair because if they do, they'll face a career of misery. Which means, by attrition, Sinclair will lose its remaining crop of good journalists, and just complete its transformation into an untrustworthy shill for the Trumpians of the world.

And then we can all go on ignoring the blah, blah, blah noise of the Sinclair Trump hornblowers. Buh-bye!

In case you forgot it, here's that "hostage video."

Now The Darker Theory Of What's Going On With Trump And His Minions

Is Donald Trump willing to go so far as to become a dictator
and throw out centuries of American Constitutional democracy.
Those fears could well be overblown but you never know with the Orange One

Yesterday, I cheered all those spontaneous protests against President Trump's executive order regarding Muslims entering the country and all that.

In addition to being immoral and possibly unconstitutional, I complained about how poorly thought out and stupid the implementation of it was.

That's still more than possible. Chances are, it's the simple reality. Trump and his minions are just stupid.

However I have a much darker and scarier theory.

Before I explain it to you, I get it the dark theory I'll describe could be quite farfetched. I'm also stringing together a bunch of facts to put the theory together. These facts could be unrelated or tenuously related, I'm not 100 percent sure.

Plus, it's possible I've been watching too many gloomy conspiratorial movies.

But, and this is a BIG but, everything I'm seeing is straight from the white supremecist and authoritarian handbook followed by megalomaniac wannabe dictators. Everything that's been going on in the past few days could be a grand plan. And a very dangerous one at that.

Given the white supremicists and wannabe dictators suddenly running the country, what I'm about to lay out feels frighteningly plausible. So here goes:

The sudden Trump executive order to block people coming from certain Muslim countries and to block Syrian refugees, among other things, caused chaos at the nation's airports as many people found themselves suddenly detained.

Even the State Department and Congressional leaders, including top Republicans, were blindsided.

The conventional wisdom, one that I adhere to, or at least wish for, was that everything was poorly thought out and executed, so it made a bigger logistical mess than you would have expected from a competent president.

But is Trump trying to create a white supremist dictatorship out of the United States? Or, slightly more likely, is Trump a dumb patsy being used by the likes of his Svengali, Steve Bannon and his crew of potential neo Nazis doing this?

The airport chaos with the Trump executive order naturally created a LOT of news media attention, and a lot of protest, which created even more media attention.

Was this situation intended?

Writing in Mother Jones, Kevin Jones wonders about this.

Like me, Jones admits the confusion and chaos could well have been just incompetence.  But he says there might be something else to it, and I find his argument intriguing.

He noted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not want to apply the ban to people with lawful permanent residence, Trump and his chief poobah, Steve Bannon, overruled them. To the unfamiliar, these are people who have green cards we're talking about

Jones writes:

"The decision to apply the executive order to green card holders, including THOSE IN TRANSIT, is almost insane. (Jones' emphasis.) Whatever else he is, Steve Bannon is a smart guy, and he had to know this would produce turmoil at airports around the country and widespread condemnation from the press. Why would he do this?"

Jones posits that Bannon really wanted turmoil and condemnation and bad press, and the airport chaos was intentional to create this flurry of media attention.  He totally wanted all this publicity. He wanted the ACLU and refugee advocates to freak out.

They did. The executive orders brought out thousands of protesters, and condemnation from the main stream media. The executive order pissed off a lot of people, including radical Islamists.

Maybe Bannon actually hoped for some terrorist attack so that he could point to the protesters and the media as un-American, and thus gain loyalty from Americans frightened by the terrorist attack.

It seems like the ground work is already being laid. There was a terrorist attack against a mosque in Quebec last night that killed at least six people.  Note that this happened in Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has very publicly supported refugees as the United States "Muslim ban" went into effect.

Note also how Bannon vilified the media as the opposition and said the press should "keep its mouth shut" about Trump. The president's counselor, Kellyanne Conway, wondered on Sunday why pundits at major media companies hadn't been fired for crticizing Trump.

See, they're trying to cow the press into being their PR department, rather than report what happened.

Bannon could also use the Quebec terrorist attack to vilify sane national leaders like Trudeau.

Then there's Trump's decision to bring Bannon into the Joint Chiefs of Staff and demoting the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

This is a big departure from past presidential practices of both parties who tried to keep politics out of the critical military decisions by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now, the decisions made will be more political, hewed toward Bannon's white supremecist views, and away from the traditional strategic military thinking the panel had always done in the past.

There's also signs a constitutional crisis might already be brewing. There are reports the Trump administration is ignoring this weekend's court orders that would allow some refugees and green card holders into the country, instead of detaining them.

The President is subject to the law just like everybody else, and if President Trump is ignoring court orders, is he trying to be our white supremacist dictator instead of the head of a Constitutional democracy?

That's the dark scenario.

The more this goes on, the more demonstrators hit the streets. Huge crowds of protesters showed up spontaneously in cities like New York, Washington DC, Boston and many others on Sunday decrying Trump's unconstitutional moves.

Democratic lawmakers have been howling, too. But with few exceptions, Republicans have remained silent. Are these Republicans complicit in Trump's possible moves to become Dictator for Life? Or maybe just OK with it, because what the hell, Trump fits their agenda and to hell with democracy.

I'm not the only one coming up with theories like this. When I was almost finished writing this, I found an analysis, much more detailed than mine, that covers exactly the same ground I did. 

The article, and my thoughts, could be paranoia, but maybe not. It's so hard to tell at this point.

Even if I'm wrong, Trump is terribly damaging the United States morally and economically, and destroying our standing in the world.

Like I said, my fears might be overblown, but let's all remain vigilant and active anyway. The nation you save might be your own.

Republicans Seem To Hate Wishes Of Voters

Another case of GOP anti-democratic instincts: South Dakota
Gov.Dennis Daugaard and his fellow state Republicans
are mad at his state's voters for approving an ethics las
for state lawmakers. 

In yet another example of how many Republicans seem to have abandoned the idea of doing the bidding of voters, South Dakota lawmakers are going to cancel a voter initiative that insisted on government ethics.

Republicans there just declared a "legislative emergency" since voters there had the gall to want ethics in their government.  Because it's definitely an emergency when voters want their lawmakers to be ethical.

According to Huffington Post, the goal of the "legislative emergency" is to wipe out the new ethics and campaign finance law South Dakota voters approved in November.

The regulations would create an independent commission to oversee proves into ethical misconduct by elected officials, impose tougher limits on campaign contributions and lobbyists' gifts to lawmakers, place restrictions on lawmakers who become lobbyists, increase disclosure requirements from independent political groups and set up a system to publicly finance elections, says the Huffington Post. 

Sounds pretty comprehensive, right?

Much too comprehensive for the Republicans running South Dakota. The state's governor, Dennis Daugaard said South Dakota voters were "hoodwinked" into voting for the law.

I don't think the voters of South Dakota are that dumb. They knew what they were doing, since there was a lot of back and forth about the merits of the proposed law before South Dakotans approved it in November.

But, the voters had the gall to want to hinder political hijinks. A big no-no, especially among Republicans, it seems.

The people have no right, apparently to influence the decisions of their so-called leaders.

Exhibit Number 1 is Donald Trump, of course, who obvious thinks what he wants in his Big Ego alternative universe, where he has a "mandate" despite losing the popular vote by around 3 million people.

Trump's life is life guided by "alternative facts" such as the YUUGE crowds that supposedly turned out for his inauguration, and the billions of lies he's told. (I don't have the space to list them, obviously.)

State Republican-led legislatures are big into this game, too, and it's not just South Dakota.

We saw the spectacle a month or two back, after North Carolina voters narrowly got a Democratic governor into the State House.

The Republicans there pounced, calling an out-of-the-blue special session in December stripping the new Democratic Governor Roy Cooper of many of his powers before he took office on the first of January. (Cooper is of course suing these Republicans.)

Republicans have been deft at gerrymandering Congressional districts, .adopting voter suppression laws, and pleasing their dwindling ultra-conservative base.

CNN noted the Republican M.O. in relation to the atrocity in North Carolina, but they could have been talking about Trump and many other Republicans across the nation.

"Extremist Republicans wo cut taxes for the wealthy, denied health care to poor people, attacked public education, suppressed votes and targeted immigrants and minorities with mean-spirited legislation are making their last stand against the ballot box and the courts."

Despite the huge damage that Trump, Congressional Republicans and many rank-and-file Republicans in red states are doing and will do, I'm still optimistic that demographics and decency will win out.

We're just going to have to spend a few painful years first. I can see already that Trump is proving every bit as terrible a president as his many critics predicted.

The arch-conservatives are overstepping, and people are going to rebel. The first real sign of that was the Womens Marches last weekend. Almost all of them drew far more participants than even some of the most optimist organizers predicted.

It was basically old white people that got Trump into power, and have enabled Republican state legislators to do their damage to everyone else.

I still think these mostly old white people will realize they've been conned. Also, as crass as this sounds, a lot of them are dying off, leaving us with a far more diverse, tolerant, moderate populace.

Moderate does not mean "not pissed off." People are pissed off, and the pendulum will swing. We'll have to be patient.

Push Americans far enough, though, and they tend to get revolutionary. Yep, we are living in interesting times. Let's hope the short term pain of the next few years leads us to long term gain.

That prospect is what keeps us going.

Donald Trump Doth Protest Too Much As Russia Tries To Seize America

I hope this isn't reality, but it feels like it lately.

This is beginning to feel like a bad James Bond movie.

It's becoming more and more apparent that Russia, Wikileaks and maybe Trump or his minions are trying to turn the United States into a wholly owned subsidiary of Putin, Inc. 

Unless we get a James Bond-like figure to save the day, I worry that this effort might succeed.

Friday, the nation got more details on the intelligence gathering that shows Russia was trying - and succeeded, apparently - at tilting our elections toward Donald Trump last November. Vladimir Putin was personally involved in some of this, apparently.

We have Trump get his top secret intelligence briefing on the issue, and still insisting that there wasn't much to the intelligence gathering that Russia did this...

Maybe most ominously, we got more evidence that WikiLeaks, far from being a way to prompt government and corporate transparancy world wide, is more like Putin's goon squad.

The news from WikiLeaks kept getting weirder and more ominous Friday.

First, WikiLeaks objected to Thursday leaks detailing parts of the intelligence report on Russia to NBC News. 

WikiLeaks tweeted: "The Obama admin/CIA is illegally funneling TOP SECRET/COMINT information to NBC for political reasons before PEOTUS even gets to read it."

(POETUS refers to President-elect Trump.)

But get this: WikiLeaks was critcizing.......leaks. A little hypocritical maybe? Or was WikiLeaks just ,mad because the NBC leak had the potential to make Trump look bad.

Besides, it appears what got leaked to NBC News Thursday was the declassified version of the intelligence report that was widely released to the public Friday.

Much more ominously, WikiLeaks seemed to issue a warning of a witch hunt against journalists and others who discuss, investigate or report on Russian meddling.

Which is interesting, since Trump himself called reports of Russian influence on the U.S. election as  political witch hunt, prompted by sour grapes among those who lost the election.

The worrisome potential WikiLeaks, went like this, as Ars Technica reports:

"A Friday Twitter post from WikiLeaks' official task force declared intent to build a publicly seachable database revolving around a particular group of people: Verified Twitter accounts.

'We are thinking of making an online database with all verified Twitter accounts & their family/job/financial/housing relationships,' the Friday tweet reads.  A follow-up post sought suggestions fro the public and said the group is 'looking for discrete (father/shareholding/party membership variables that can be put into our AI software."

In short it appears that WikiLeaks might want to intimidate journalists into silence by "doxing" them. That means making their personal information such as home, family etc. public so goons who support  Trump can harass, threaten or even assault journalists or others who criticize Trump.

A very Russian thing to do, don't you think?  Suppress dissent, intimidate critics, stamp out free speech.

And WikiLeaks says they're for the truth? Ha!

I'm not sure what's in store once Trump takes office. Trump's constant dismissiveness of Russian hacking indicates either he wants to partner with Puting to squelched democracy, or more likely, Russia thinks Trump is a chump and has the goods on him.

Either way, this won't end well.

Let's hope people - and the media - fight efforts to stop the spread of information about who is influencing what in America, and holding on to the basics of democracy.

It's interesting that an outfit like WikiLeaks which says they want information freely available now so obviously shilling for such an anti-freedom outfit like Russia.

Once press freedom and freedom of speech is suppressed, which seems to be the effort underway, we all sink under the thumb of oppressive dictators.

I hope the resistance is stronger

Trump keeps calling the news about Russian hacking "a political witch hunt."

Trump appears to have gotten a number of important details wrong about the NBC story. No one “gave” NBC the top-secret report, as Trump claimed. As the NBC story notes, the official quoted by the network never even saw a copy of the intelligence report; he or she just repeated to NBC what someone had said about its findings.

On Friday morning, Trump told The New York Times that the ongoing public interest in possible Russian interference in the presidential election was “a political witch hunt.” He also complained the election-hacking story was getting more attention than other instances where government computers were compromised. These previous hacks, however, did not include releasing the stolen information to the public.

North Carolina Exhibit One On How GOP Could Destroy National Democracy

Demostrators rail against an undemocratic power grab
by North Carolina Republicans. At least 20
were arrested, including at least one journalist.  

Autocrats entering the White House under Donald Trump need to look no further than North Carolina on how they can end democracy and usurp the will of the people.

The Republican legislature in North Carolina this week basically launched a coup d'état against the recently elected governor, a Democrat.

As numerous news organizations, including Daily Kos point out, Republicans in North Carolina, at least, don't give a shit about such niceties as the rule of law, the will of voters and fair elections.

The Republicans in North Carolina held a surprise special session in which they took a lot of powers away from the governor and gave it to the legislature. That's because a Democrat, Roy Cooper was just elected North Carolina governor.

They also changed the Supreme Court into elected positions, to ensure Republicans get on the state's highest court from the Republcans' badly gerrymandered districts.

That's because the North Carolina Supreme Court has in the recent past ruled against the Republicans' shenanigans, power grabs and voter suppression moves.

If you think this is just a North Carolina thing, it isn't. That's why you should be worried. The Donald Trump administration is likely to do similar things writ large in the entire United States.

Your rights to pick and choose who leads the nation might be going by the wayside, which is a truly terrible and terrifying thing.

North Carolina has been at this for awhile. It's a lot of work destroying democracy, apparently, but they've proven it can be done.

Daily Kos notes that this has been the M.O. of some GOPers for awhile, and it might only get worse.

"Republicans had previously gerrymandered the legislature so aggressively that they won to-proof majorities in 2012 despite losing the popular vote, and they easily maintained them in 2016 despite McCrory's loss. 

A courty in 2016 struck down those maps as unconstitution racial gerrymanders, meaning the North North Carolina Republicans are using an illegally obtained legislative majorityto ursurp the powers of the fairly elected new Democratic governor. 

Democracy relies on electoral losers recognizing the legitimacy of the victor, and this breathtaking power grab can only be describd as a full-blown legislative coup d-etat design to subvert democracy itself."

Slate describes how serious the North Carolina situation is:

"What's happening in North Carolina is not politics as usual. It is an extraordinarily disturbing legislative coup, a flagrant effort to maintain one-party rule by rejecting democratic norms and revoking the will of the voters.

It is the kind of thing we might expect to see in Venezuela, not a U.S state. It should terrify every American citizen who believes in the rule of law. This is so much more than a partisan power grab. This ia an attack on democracy itself. "

Oh, sure the courts might overturn what North Carolina Republicans did. Until we get new judges. In North Carolina, newly elected governor Roy Cooper plans to sue the legislature for what they've done.

What do we do when Trumpsters get rid of federal judges that rely on things like the rule of law and precedent in favor of hacks that would do their bidding?

Then, we would see the North Carolina-style autocratic rule go nation wide. Democracy would die.

As a patriotic American who has used his First Amendment rights to criticize, praise or mock elected officials, I really worry if my ability to do so will soon end.

 We can all hope that cooler heads prevail, and lawmakers, judges and such will find their moral compass and act in accordance to the Constitution, and not some autocratic dimwit like Donald Trump and his ilk .

But we can't count on it. North Carolina Republicans didn't find their democratic moral compass, so why should we rely on others?

Since Trump was elected, I've kept hoping that my fears about the stability of our democracy and rule of law were overblown.

Unfortunately, those fears look more and more like they're well placed.

I don't know if we as citizens can fight back all that well. Still, the time might be coming for a new American Revolution.

Welcome To The (Permanent) Oligarchy

This man might have just killed American constitutional democracy
and the American voters let him.  

Yesterday, the American people threw away the Constitution and many of the freedoms they assumed would be there forever.

Many voters wanted that outcome. The people that supported Trump agreed with him that niceties like press freedom, religous freedom (unless you're a Christian!) and due process just got in the way of, well, I don't know, but apparently they thought it got in the way of something.

The majority of voters just wanted an authoritarian who steamrolls through everything, legal or not.

America, you made your choice. What you don't realize is, if you find out you don't like your choice,  you'll never be able to change it. Think you can vote in a new Congress two years from now, or a new President four years from now ?

Hah!

Trump and his Republican minions now control everything, including the Supreme Court. If Trump sets the nation on a disastrous course, there's nothing we can do about it.

Trump and Co. will surely change voting laws to severely restrict the vote among people who might not want him to continue in office. That's what right wind oligarchs do. Team Trump will lie and lie to its gullible supporters, so that dwindling crowd will keep him in for a long, long time.

Maybe after eight years, Trump will make is so he has a third term. Or one of his henchmen will become President when he's done. Surely it won't be someone in favor of true democracy.

If Trump becomes involved in misdeed, we probably won't find out what Trump might be doing wrong. Yes, the media has its problems but we won't have investigative journalism, as it will be suppressed if not outright banned.

Team Trump team will suppress dissension. Taking it to the streets for peaceful demonstrations against him might someday become illegal. Or at least always be met with rubber bullets or worse.

So much for Free Speech. Right wing authoritarians suppress dissension any way they can.

I've already criticized Trump a lot, so it's part of my permanent record. The Internet is forever. I literally think I might be in jail or at least facing an expensive lawsuit within two years. Not because of what I will do, but because of what I have done - criticize and mock Trump.   (I'm still criticizing him now because I have nothing to lose. The damage is done.)

I wouldn't be surprised if people are jailed for criticizing his government some day. Or at the very least the more likely threat of jail or lawsuits will suppress any kind of vocal opposition.

If a Trump presidency impoverishes you or otherwise harms you, there's nothing you can do. If you have Muslim or Hispanic friends, there's a chance you'll have to say bye bye to some of them. If America doesn't become "great again," as Trump promised, too bad. You lose.

You made your choice America. Now you have to live with it.

Permanently.