A contestant who has been representing Sinclair Broadcasting on this season of Survivor was blindsided this week and voted off his tribe.
Rick Devens, who anchors the morning news at WGXA in Macon, Georgia, was voted out of the fourth episode when his Lesu tribe split into two pairs: Rick and David Wright on one side and Kelley Wentworth and Lauren O’Connell on the other.
Fifth cast member Dan “Wardog” DaSilva then became the swing vote and he decided to play with the girls, thereby sending Rick to Extinction Island.
He has joined fellow inhabitants Reem Daly, Keith Sowell and Chris Underwood.
The fact Devens is the first newscaster on Survivor could have a lot to do with who employs him.
Sinclair Broadcasting, referred to as “Fox News lite” in broadcast circles, has been heavily promoting Devens appearance across its stations with press releases promoting “Sinclair Broadcast Group anchor Rick Devens.”
Sinclair has been running conservative programming for over a decade.
Last year, 193 local Sinclair affiliates began running a series of promotional segments, warning of a scourge of “fake news” promoted by “members of the media who use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think.’”
The segments, which echo the Trump administration’s anti-media rhetoric, are eerily uniform across all Sinclair affiliates, so much so that Deadspin’s Timothy Burke was able to edit them together into a supercut showing dozens of Sinclair anchors saying the exact same words.
How America's largest local TV owner turned its news anchors into soldiers in Trump's war on the media: https://t.co/iLVtKRQycL pic.twitter.com/dMdSGellH3
— Deadspin (@Deadspin) March 31, 2018
The video is just another example of Sinclair stations’ strong partisan tilt.
The executive producer of Survivor is Mark Bennett, a longtime Trump supporter who calls the president his “soul mate” and who was the bridge that made Trump politically possible.
Actor Tom Arnold contacted the Los Angeles Police Department last September after he was allegedly attacked by Burnett at an Emmy party in Los Angeles.
“Mark Burnett just went apes**; choked me at this huge Emmy party then he ran away with his torn Pink shirt & missing gold chain. I’m waiting for LAPD,” wrote Arnold on Twitter shortly after the fight.
Arnold has been publicly bashing Burnett for months over his insistence that the producer is protecting Trump by refusing to release outtakes from “The Apprentice” in which Trump allegedly uses racial slurs and makes other disturbing comments.
Mark Burnett and Donald Trump.
Bennett and Sinclair are on the same page when it comes to promoting Trump and having each others backs.
That’s why a TV personality from a Sinclair station was easy for Burnett to cast on the show.
Just last week, Sinclair mandated that all of its stations run a “Town Hall” special on prescription drugs, which actually could have been a paid infomercial for Trump’s reelection campaign.
Sinclair has faced severe criticism for forcing its nearly 200 local television stations to air right-leaning “must run” segments, including commentaries by Boris Epshteyn, the Sinclair’s chief political analyst and a former Trump White House official.
{READ: Jim Heath On Why Sinclair Remains A Menace To Journalism}
Charles Lewis, the founder of the investigative Center for Public Integrity, said about Sinclair employees, “They are stuck with an idiosyncratic owner with its own political views and agenda. It’s a nightmarish scenario for journalists.”
A recent paper by Emory University political scientists Gregory Martin and Josh McCrain found that when Sinclair buys a local station, its local news program begin to cover more national and less local politics, the coverage becomes more conservative, and viewership actually falls — suggesting that the rightward tilt isn’t enacted as a strategy to win more viewers but as part of a persuasion effort.
Sinclair has faced criticism for pushing a conservative agenda on its member stations.
“These are local stations that advertise themselves as affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, and draw off the credibility of local anchors to present themselves as part of the community,” Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, wrote on Twitter.
Last year, journalists at KOMO, a Sinclair station in Seattle, said they received reporting instructions from the company that were politically motivated.
Meanwhile, Burnett diligently worked on Trump’s inauguration and described Trump as his “soul mate.”
So while we watch to see how Devens does on Extinction Island, remember his bosses are busy producing propaganda at the expense of true journalism.