"Over the last month, viewers in dozens of local media markets across the country began to hear impassioned warnings from their trusted local anchors about the danger mainstream media outlets and “false news” posed to democracy.
It was soon discovered that these weren’t genuine outpourings of principle or belief from the anchors, but scripted monologues mandated by their superiors, and repeated verbatim across the country. Sinclair Broadcast Group
, the single largest owner of local television stations in the United States, had sent down marching orders; these were must-runs.
Must-runs are nothing new for Sinclair station employees; they’ve been happening for ages: prepackaged stories designed to be aired over a specific period of time during local newscasts, and very often politically charged.
They’ve included mandatory daily terrorism stories, hit pieces on Hillary Clinton, and forceful denunciations of “fake news,” a term with which we are all by now deeply familiar. The past month’s word-for-word diatribes are simply the latest example of this, and notably, have finally caught public notice."
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/03/the-real-danger-in-sinclair-broadcasts-fake-news-scandal.html
https://www.prwatch.org/fakenews/tv-stations