CNY Central's WTVH anchors read Sinclair script

CNY Central's Michael Benny and Allison Bybee are seen reading a script for Syracuse television station WTVH. The promo, written by its parent company Sinclair Broadcast Group, is identical to one read by other Sinclair-owned stations across the country.

Sinclair has been accused of pushing a right-wing agenda without disclosing a political bias.

"...We're concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media," the script says. "Some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda..."

"This is extremely dangerous to our democracy."

Sinclair owns or operates 176 TV stations, including NBC 3 (WSTM-TV), CW 6 (WSTQ) and CBS 5 (WTVH) in Syracuse. The company recently struck a $3.9 billion deal to acquire 42 more stations from Tribune Media, potentially reaching 72 percent of Americans.

[erikfriesen]

These people talk like hostage victims reading demand notes.

[smpkd]

Curious that these 100+ stations are all refusing to publicly admit the fact that they were all ordered to read this same statement on the air. Do they decide which facts they are willing to talk about?

[randywein]

Fighting "fake news" with fake news. Fair balanced and factual ... Yeah boy you betcha.

[johnjingleheimerschmitt]

“We are human....and not mere brainless puppet actors that will read literally just about anything for money”

This is hilarious, sad and distusting all at the same time

[koolkiller]

Anyone notice how they scrubbed the original video that showed a montage of dozens of news stations saying this together?

[helpmegetmillionviewsofmy]

Good lord, this is like TV news in Russia. Scary stuff. Obviously this a a demanded Script they HAVE to read. This is getting to be more like State Run TV.

[kneelbusirs]

Poor people. They look like they have a gun pointing at them from behind the cameras.

[jmms]

You would think they were talking about Fox

[ranelgallardo]

I bet these anchors cried after this and said “Why did I do this!?”

[contentofcharacter]

I don’t see what’s so bad. Committing to actually report the news. How terrible!

[donfon]

Great timing and orchestration. Ya' know, anyone who could watch this, even without any pre-conceived notions, and not know it was PURE/PACKAGED propaganda, is beyond reason.

[aliciamarie]

What is really sick, is they sent them dress code instructions.

[standandfight]

If they fall short please respond to their concern and complaint section on their website? You mean the same way every corporate entity who has a website with a feedback option and never really replies with any human oversight so you all can ignore and bury the complaints. Oh wait, you think that sending an auto generated email that says "do not reply" on it is your way of thinking we are supposed to believe "you will reply". Yeah that has gotten us all so far since it's inception hasn't it? We waste time typing out concerns into a character limited complaint box only to have an auto generated response telling us how you value our feedback and will look at the complaint, and then we never hear another word. Last I checked to only way to make sure you are hearing us and actually will do something about anything is to have us showing up there to get in your doors so you can see our faces. That's the way it's always worked and setting up websites so we can go online to complain has made things a lot easier, for them. They continue with business as usual when all they have to worry about is what someone typed into a problem box that who knows is in charge of reviewing it and can just stick it in a folder that gets buried in their own servers somewhere, if they don't just delete it. We literally have nothing governing that sort of thing.

[mrswimmyboy]

Second! We'll see how biased Sinclair is by their reporting, on a regular basis. That's all that matters.

[CutieRingoJoy]

All their news seems to look like low quality and they speak like their Gaslighting and super robotic it's scaring me

[cloudy.with.a.meatballs]

“We work very hard to seek the truth and strive to be fair, balanced and factual.

Be considerate it our honour, privilege, to responsibly deliver the news everyday.”

Ok not hard enough.

[biggusdickus]

This woman news anchor has the same exact yellow dress that the woman and the other video I just watched had. Something very weird going on here

[humbughumbughumbug]

OMG PEOPLE READING A SCRIPT ABOUT BEING NEITHER RIGHT NOR LEFT IN THEIR REPORTING AND TELLING US HOW TO REPORT GAH STOP I WANT BIASED NEWS WITH ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY!

[angrykoala]

Nice reading of the script. Well done robots.

[BlackAnvil]

Twilight Zone music is playing in the background