Associated Press/Evan Vucci
In this Thursday, March 15, 2018, file photo, U.S. President Donald Trump talks with reporters during a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in the Oval Office of the White House, in Washington.
- President Donald Trump tweeted a defense of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which sent out a "must-read" script to anchors at hundreds of stations around the country criticizing media bias.
- Trump said Sinclair was still "superior" to CNN and other cable
news networks, calling them "Fake News Networks." - Sinclair has itself come under scrutiny for supposedly biased, pro-Trump and conservative coverage.
President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Monday to defend the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns hundreds of local news stations across the country, after the company forced anchors at its stations to read a pre-prepared script decrying media bias and "false news."
"So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased," Trump wrote. "Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke."
Trump has long voiced his opposition to "fake news" and outlets like CNN and NBC during the campaign and into his presidency, and has frequently referred to journalists collectively as "fake news."
The message Sinclair had its anchors read criticized "members of the media [who] use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control 'exactly what people think'."
"This is extremely dangerous to a democracy," the message continued.
Clips of anchors reading the message went viral over the weekend, and comedian John Oliver did a segment about Sinclair on HBO's "Last Week Tonight" on Sunday.
Sinclair had itself come under fire previously for biased, pro-Trump political coverage. The broadcaster has often given its stations "must-run" segments that included commentary from former Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, content criticizing then-Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004, and terrorism "alerts," Deadspin reported.
But Kirstin Pellizzaro, who worked at a station owned by Sinclair in Kalamazoo, Michigan, said this may have been the first time the company had asked anchors themselves to read a script handed to them.
"Some of them were a little slanted, a little biased," Pellizzaro told The New York Times. "Packages of this nature can make journalists uncomfortable."
The senior vice president of news at Sinclair, Scott Livingston, defended his company's move.
"We are focused on fact-based reporting," Livingston told the Baltimore Sun. "That's our commitment to our communities. That's the goal of these announcements: to reiterate our commitment to reporting facts in a pursuit of truth."
Watch a compilation of Sinclair's scripted coverage here: