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Month: August 2017

Review of Sinclair Broadcasting

The Sinclair Broadcasting group is one of the largest TV broadcasting companies in the United States. It went public in 1995, though it was founded in 1986. They boast of 173 stations, even more, if the proposed sales are approved. Most of these stations are directly owned by the companies while the others are operated through shared service agreements or local marketing agreements. The stations of the company are affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox.Sinclair Sports Television

It is a producer of sports content as well as one of the leading news providers for local news in the country. They also own a cable network and four radio stations. Multiple platforms like over-the-air, digital or multichannel video distributors are used to deliver their broadcast content.

Fair and Balanced Conservatism?

They are not new to controversy as they have received backlash and outrage from the media and their community of viewers. This has followed as a result of scrutiny regarding their negative news coverage for some time in their company stations. Analysts who have been following the Baltimore-area company since its beginning have noted with grave concern their history of leaning towards conservative candidates, politics, and causes.

Connections with Donald Trump

In April 2017, Sinclair announced that it had hired Boris Epshteyn, who served the Trump administration briefly as a White House assistant communications director and as the chief political analyst during Donald’s Trump campaigns. This, as you can imagine, has caused quite a stir and elicited mixed reactions from all over the country.

Their coverage is contrary to the fair and balanced news programming expected by media stations. Some of the news staff from the Sinclair group have also criticized segments, editorials, and specific reports that are regarded as “must runs,” due to the kind of views they disseminate. One of their staff members even admitted to trying to deliberately schedule the pieces during lesser viewed times of the newscasts.

With the rapid growth of the broadcast over recent years, analysts fear that it is only going to promote conservative politics at more and more stations.

Call Down the Thunder on Companies

BB-8 from  ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’

Perhaps we should have called this Bring the Sunshine instead of Call Down the Thunder. We want to give both good and bad reviews of companies, restaurants, movies, whatever. Maybe we should have called it Thunder and Sunshine and really confused people.

We will be doing posts that go into details but here are some short snippets.

Movie – Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Highly anticipated, very disappointing. Seemed like a rehash of the original story instead of something new. Yet again a droid has a hidden message. Once again Han Solo tries to help deliver the message. Somehow, despite the Empire being defeated there are still Storm Troopers around. There turns out to be another “Death Star”. Come on, with all the creative minds in Hollywood they should be able to come up with something better than this.  In contrast, Rogue One was more interesting and was a nice prequel for the whole series.

Baltimore Orioles – Why do their up and coming pitchers only seem to pitch well after they get traded away? Since Jake Arrieta went to the Cubs he has be lights out. What that kind of pitching would have done for the Orioles. One can only dream.  Then they just got beat by Parker Bridwell who has been pitching well for the Angels since he got traded away by the Orioles. And those are just two, there are others.

Restaurant – Maggie’s Farm – Congratulations on being voted the best Farm to Table restaurant in Maryland. Haven’t been there but several friends have said it is quite good and we look forward to going.

Local Company – A.J. Billig and Co. – Kudos to them. They helped us auction off a property for almost twice what we thought we would get for it. They did a great job of advertising and getting people to the auction and then creating excitement for the property. Wish every transaction could go that well.

So we will give thoughts on a range of companies, restaurants, movies and perhaps even places to visit. It could be a tree services company, a limousine company, a carpet cleaning company, a septic tank company, plumber, electrician, metal fabricator or any of a myriad of other possibilities.  We will let you know if the carpet cleaner made things worse or got out a stubborn stain. Whether the limo company failed to show up or treated you like a prince or princess. Don’t even think about what could go wrong with a septic tank company. I guess you could say we are creating our own mini Yelp.