People. Stay woke. We now have a large percentage of the population being fed propaganda through their nightly news.

Sinclair Broadcasting, which owns 193 local television stations across the country, recently forced every news anchor at every Sinclair station to read the exact same prepared script. The script accused “some members of the media” of using their platforms to spread “fake news,” to promote their own biases and “to control exactly what people think.”

Sinclair often hands out prepared scripts for their anchors to read on the air that amount to adoration of Trump’s policies that favor corporations like Sinclair. They hire “political analysts” to do the same: present pro-Trump pieces that all stations are required to air. I couldn’t have invented a better illustration of  promoting your own biases and trying to control what people think.

Those news anchors should have refused to be complicit in the spread of propaganda. They needed to leave their stations en masse immediately, instead of looking back somewhere down the road to see exactly where they might have done something to halt the spread of the far right propaganda machine run by rich white men.

The prepared statements the anchors read are the words of the white male establishment, representing no one but the white male establishment. No effort was made to include any other point of view beyond that of the board of Sinclair News.  That in no way reflects the work of reporters. The very act of reading prepared statements written by the owners of a TV station is antithetical to the job the news anchors were hired to do.

Maybe if the news anchors themselves weren’t so predominantly white, there would have been a better chance of rebellion in the ranks. Nevertheless, these people entered into the field of journalism to help the populace know and understand the facts, to tell our stories in real time, to show us what is happening in parts of the country we can’t see.

I understand that Sinclair binds anchors to a draconian contract that draws blood money out of them if they dare to quit. Sorry guys. It’s just not enough to write a lucid statement of the bone crushing that happens between a rock and a hard place. Do the right thing. Move on.

If enough news anchors band together, they could form their own independent news agency. If they contacted a few of the very wealthy folks who have stood in opposition to Trump’s tax plan and who have said publicly that they wanted to help the country, the news anchors could gather a good-sized pool of foundation money for redirecting their energies into worthwhile reporting. They need to do something constructive before they start popping pills and hitting the bottle to ease the pain of knowing they are complicit in the oppression and degradation of everyone who is poor, or non-white, or does not follow the far right conservative party line.

This country is already suffering from the propaganda machine that is Fox News. Once upon a time TV journalists would have been fired if they told lies, spread conspiracy theories or hired commentators who fabricated facts to support one group’s set of beliefs. That, now, is the culture at Fox News.

Let’s make one thing clear: fake news is news that has been fabricated. It may be a story fabricated for social media and spread to bully someone, or headlines designed to sway public opinion prior to a crucial vote. It may be statements based wholly on belief and unsupported by the facts, such as “immigrants are rapists,” or, “immigrants are stealing jobs from Americans.”

Fake news is essentially the same thing as photo shopping an image – you take one thing and make it look like something else, such as the photo spread around social media after the Parkland shooting that made it look like Emma Gonzalez was ripping up the Constitution, when in fact she was ripping up a paper target used for shooting practice. Fake news is tweeting a picture of construction trucks repairing a decaying border wall in California and claiming it is a picture of new construction starting on a new border wall.

Real news is reporting the actual numbers of a protest rally, or the actual amount of pollution caused by fossil fuels, or the actual costs of living on minimum wages. Real news is telling the stories of people who are affected by the lack of response to hurricane damage in Puerto Rico, or the women affected by the rape culture in this country, or the immigrants seeking asylum, or the Native Americans protesting the desecration of their sacred sites along with the rape of their Mother Earth. Real news gives us real knowledge of issues, such as the the war in Syria or the opioid addiction crisis.

The independent journalists of Standing Rock are among the finest examples of journalism for these times. The Powers That Be (PTBs) decreed that journalists covering the Standing Rock protests of the Dakota Access pipeline had to register with the Governor’s office, which would decide who was a “real” journalist and would be granted credentials. However, the Morton County Sherriff’s office was the agency actually handling the process, the same agency that was responding to the peaceful protest with enough armament to destroy a city while removing as many reporters from the scene as possible.

In what was passed off as a “clerical error,” the telephone number provided to many of the independent journalists was incorrect. Journalists called for days. The email addresses provided were also wrong, apparently, as no journalist I spoke with ever received a response.

On the morning of the eviction, however, the correct number was leaked by a member of the Army Corps of Engineers, but too few on the ground knew about it. And guess what? Even if a journalist was able to scramble and obtain a Governor-approved credential (i.e. being added to a list), it didn’t matter. (From Fear and Loathing of the Press at Standing Rock, by Michael Nigro, Huffington Post, March 17, 2017)

Throughout the Standing Rock protest, journalists had been either ignored or arrested and charged with crimes.  They were confined to “staging areas” that provided limited views of what was happening in the camp. That, in addition to the blatant suppression of news through bureaucratic red tape, made for a journalistic nightmare.

A steady stream of corporate media sources left the scene in frustration. The night before the camp was scheduled to be raided, the only journalists left were independent and civilian journalists – people armed with cell phones. And still they managed to tell the story through photographs and live streamed videos. They are the models of real and truth-telling journalism.

In Italy, in the aftermath of disclosures about Russian interference in this last American presidential election, high school students are participating in a curriculum that will help them learn how to spot fake news. The European Union is cracking down on social media companies that spread fake news. England has kicked Fox News out of the country. These folks are already miles ahead of the United States, where we seem to have fallen into a state of lethargy over the importance of the free press in the preservation of our democracy.

World Press Freedom Day is coming up in May. Let’s commit ourselves to using that day to deepen our understanding of the connections between a free press and living as equals.