It’s always discouraging to run across a news conglomerate that force-feeds commentary to its many local outlets, which then run it as if it were a local creation.
As we’ve noted before, Sinclair Broadcasting, which films its “News Central” segment at company HQ in Baltimore and beams to local stations nationwide, has mastered this tactic. And now, it seems, Freedom Communications, publisher of 28 daily newspapers and 37 weekly publications nationwide, is taking a page from Sinclair’s book.
Over the last couple days, at least seven of Freedom’s newspapers have run an identical unsigned editorial calling on Congress to uphold the president’s temporary repeal of the Bacon-Davis Act in the Gulf Coast.
Bacon-Davis, by way of some quick background, requires that contractors working on federally funded construction projects pay workers the prevailing wage in the area in which the projects are taking place. Under the president’s plan, contractors in the Gulf region will be able to pay workers less — far less, if the market bears.
We were alerted to the identical op-eds by an item on the Facing South blog, and in looking into it ourselves, dug up a few more examples of the chain running the same editorial in its papers.
The piece so far has run in the Appeal-Democrat of Marysville-Yuba City, California; the Daily News of Jacksonville, North Carolina; the Free Press of Kinston, North Carolina and at least four other papers, according to a quick — and admittedly incomplete — scan of the pieces Freedom’s papers made available online.
It’s noteworthy that all of the editorials are unsigned, and there is nothing in them to suggest that they came from corporate HQ (or wherever they originated), which, logically, would lead readers to believe that they were written by the local editorial staff. Obviously, they weren’t.
Now, this isn’t a capital crime, but when homogenized product is being pumped to so many communities scattered across the nation, it does speak to the larger issue of media consolidation. In this case, what appears to be the company line is being toed by newspapers from California to North Carolina, with readers none the wiser.
The local press is the backbone of the nation’s media, and it used to be an institution that was proud to be the glue that held many a community together. In the headlong rush of vast corporations to buy up more and more discrete chunks of the media landscape, we are, step by step, losing that local voice in favor of partisan, corporate missives from on high.
–Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.