Are Disinfo Campaigns on Your Local News?
A Republican disinformation campaign was disseminated on 86 local news websites by a parent company.
"Biden appears to freeze, slur words during White House Juneteenth event," read a June 10 headline posted across those local news sites. The source for the story was the Republican National Committee, which posted a deceptively edited video to one of its X (Twitter) accounts. Then on June 13, the same sites posted an article titled, "Biden appears to wander away during G7 summit, escorted back by Italian PM," and again the source was the same RNC X account using another deceptively edited video.
The parent company of these local news stations is Sinclair Broadcast Group. It publishes national news stories on The National Desk, which also get published to its local news stations websites.
President Joe Biden is old (81). News stories investigating whether he is undergoing age-related issues that could hinder his effectiveness as president are perfectly legitimate. And the same is true with Republican presidential nominee and former president Donald Trump (78). But what Sinclair is doing is unethical. It is using Biden's political opposition as a primary and only source. Sinclair is behaving as an arm of the Republican Party, rather than a news organization.
Americans highly trust local news. A recent Pew Research survey found that 71% of adults believe their local news media reports news accurately. And with the decline of print journalism across the country, local TV stations like those owned by Sinclair may be the only source of local news.
This is not a condemnation of the local news reporters who work at these stations. They may be doing fine work covering their region. But the parent company clearly has a partisan agenda and national news from the parent company to these local stations cannot be trusted. Is your local news station owned by Sinclair? Check this list to find out.
Read:
“Sinclair floods local news websites with hundreds of deceptive articles about Biden's mental fitness”
“Misleading GOP videos of Biden are going viral. The fact-checks have trouble keeping up.”
Our Next Conference!
Politics, Polarization, and Peacemaking
Helping pastors heal the wounds of our divided nation in their churches and communities
When: July 25
Where: The Outlet Community Church, 3039 Briarcliff Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30329
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Summer Book Club
Join us in reading Prof. John Inazu's new book is Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect.
Here is the description:
Are you discouraged by our divided, angry culture, where even listening to a different perspective sometimes feels impossible? If so, you're not alone, and it doesn't have to be this way. Learning to Disagree reveals the surprising path to learning how to disagree in ways that build new bridges with our neighbors, coworkers, and loved ones--and help us find better ways to live joyfully in a complex society.
Get a copy at the AVC Bookshop (AVC gets a percentage of the sale) or your favorite bookstore.
The AVC Book Club will meet every Monday, 8pm eastern, until July 29. Next week, we’ll be on chapter 3. Sign up now!
What We’re Reading
Study: “Attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines may have “spilled over” to other, unrelated vaccines along party lines in the United States”
This study used data from pre- and post-COVID surveys to examine vaccine attitudes in the United States. We found evidence consistent with an ideological “spillover” effect: Liberals’ attitudes became more positive towards non-COVID vaccines (flu, MMR, HPV, chickenpox) and conservatives’ attitudes became more negative. These spillover effects are perplexing because the COVID-19 vaccines were developed more rapidly than the others and (some of them) were the first to use mRNA technology on a mass scale to achieve immunization. Hence, there were reasons to isolate one’s attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines rather than generalize them. This exacerbates current vaccine communication challenges.
Link.
Seth Masket: “An evangelical Christian, just not the religious kind”
As loyal readers of this newsletter will note, I have argued that the important shift within the Republican Party over the past few decades has come from the rise of conservative populism. The Christian nationalism account and the conservative populism account are not necessarily opposites, and indeed both may be occurring simultaneously. I tend to see the populist story as one with greater explanatory power, however. The reason for this is that conservative populism was already guiding the Republican Party to a place largely consistent with Trump’s worldview before he even expressed interest in running for office. By contrast, Christian nationalism has some notable areas of conflict with Trump, and in nearly all of those, it has ceded the ground to Trump.
NBC News: “Charlie Kirk once pushed a 'secular worldview.' Now he's fighting to make America Christian again.”
Six years ago, Charlie Kirk, a right-wing provocateur who founded the conservative activist group Turning Point USA, strongly criticized the evangelical political movement he now helps lead.
Kirk, known then primarily for his work mobilizing college-age Republicans, described Jesus as welcoming and tolerant and denounced Christians’ “sanctimonious approach” to homosexuality and other issues. He argued politics should be advanced through a “secular worldview” and slammed attempts by the evangelical right, beginning in the 1970s, to “impose” their version of morality “through government policy.”
“We do have a separation of church and state,” Kirk told the conservative commentator Dave Rubin in 2018, “and we should support that.”
Kirk, now 30, has since reversed his position. It’s a transformation that, according to political and religious scholars, embodies and reinforces a growing embrace of Christian nationalist thinking within the Republican Party in the era of Donald Trump.
What We’re Watching
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