This is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy on HackerTube: recommended by 4 Hacker News commenters across 3 separate months, 2020–2026.
commentary · evergreen
A short supercut showing many Sinclair-owned local news anchors reading the same scripted warning about biased news, word for word.
HN cites it as a vivid example of coordinated messaging and media consolidation, though some mentions use the title only as a quip.
“Only takes me one minute and thirty six seconds to convince anyone I meet of this point”
20 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
Only takes me one minute and thirty six seconds to convince anyone I meet of this point: "This is Extremely Dangerous to our Democracy" - ▶ this video
in “Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them” · View on HN
Same here. I thought it was so obvious and then called out publicly and exposed. It doesn’t matter. I think that as long as the right people in the media are greased it doesn't enter the mass consciousness. If you look at the mass media, you will see that the actors on the news will show emotions around certain subjects, they will make a grind or a disgusted face while talking about a problem at a company or a political movement. That is what change people mind when repeated many times. This video (from a shadow banned account) show how the media talk with one voice. ▶ this video
in “How pervasive is corporate fraud?” · View on HN
Something I noticed after I watched an episode of Stoic Finance[1] about a possible "impending crash of the Chinese economy" is that YouTube started recommending about a dozen "independent" channels. I put the word independent in air quotes because they all have near-identical looking title cards with the similar fonts, some variant of the phrasing "The collapse has begun!", and the same-ish content. Different presenters, different channels, same message. Over and over. And over. Reminds me of the "This is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy" clip that edited together dozens of apparently independent local news channels saying the same script, verbatim.[2] You've got to wonder if there's someone with deep pockets trying to influence public opinion on China? Or is it just the same thing as the "local" news channels, where a bunch of YouTubers have been "bought" by a corporation that send them material to read? I would love to know if anyone on Hacker News knows something about this kind of thing... [1] In case you're interested: [link] ...and some copy-cats clips I recommend opening in a private tab unless you want to be inundated with even more clones: [link] [link] [link] [link] [2] Entertaining and terrifying: ▶ this video
in “An odd discovery on Spotify” · View on HN
This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. (in case someone missed this, it's incredible: ▶ this video )
in “Hottest May in History for Texas” · View on HN
All together, everyone! ▶ this video "This sharing of biased and false news has become all to common on social media" ... say the individual talking heads, all paid by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns or operates 193 TV stations in the USA, covering 40% of US households. You'd be mad to think that consolidated control of information, the endgame of "mainstream" media, is of benefit to society. "Mainstream" media is financed either directly by very rich individuals, who then use their control of the thing they own (even just by controlling its hiring policies, to give like-minded people a voice) to spam their own agenda on the populace, or a generic money-making enterprise that then deals with less-affluent people who want to spam the populace (advertisers).
in “Network of Scottish X accounts go dark amid Iran blackout” · View on HN
Phrasing seems a bit orchestrated, and seems like it's meant to get you to give up because it's happening no matter what. That video with "and this is dangerous to our democracy" comes to mind. Edit: Found it ▶ this video
in “Age verification is coming for the whole internet” · View on HN
> The firehose of falsehood, also known as firehosing, is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels (like news and social media) without regard for truth or consistency. An outgrowth of Soviet propaganda techniques, the firehose of falsehood is a contemporary model for Russian propaganda under Russian President Vladimir Putin. ▶ this video
in “Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods” · View on HN
> Local news has a better hit ratio, but it’s still like 5% maybe at best on any given day. ▶ this video Local news isn't immune either.
in “I Hate the News” · View on HN
▶ this video edit: To add more color: "local news" is increasingly not local anymore. The video I linked to is a collection of "local" stations that are owned by Sinclair reading from the same script rather literally.
in “Negativity Drives Online News Consumption” · View on HN
> This video (from a shadow banned account) show how the media talk with one voice. ▶ this video That was that Sinclair media thing. The fact that they have independent teams serving many smaller markets gave it away. If (say) CNN were to do the same thing, they could probably reach an even bigger audience with one guy reading the script, which can't be exposed with a supercut.
in “How pervasive is corporate fraud?” · View on HN
The consolidation of media, ongoing for decades, has created concentrations of power that leave the entire media system vulnerable to people like Elon Musk. Twitter and Facebook are two particularly dense concentrations of power, but the general problem goes back a century at least and it's a problem with media generally, not specific to technology. Sinclair Broadcast Group ( ▶ this video ) and William Randolph Hearst come to mind particularly.
in “Twitter just banned a wave of prominent journalists with no explanation” · View on HN
That was true until Sinclair bought up a bunch of local stations and started requiring identical stories. This was part of Sinclair's dislike of social media doing moderation of malicious and hateful content. ▶ this video
in “Nobody Seems to Have an Answer for Propaganda Posing as Local News” · View on HN
▶ this video The daily news is arguably narrative driven, and people have noticed many local stations share the exact same script it doesn't matter if its Fox, Abc, Cbs, Nbc. That video is still being shared widely on both left and the right.
in “Broken and distrusting: why Americans are pulling away from the daily news” · View on HN
Pretty much. This is the next generation version of "This is extremely dangerous to our democracy"^1 level of collusion to push narratives. 1 - ▶ this video
in “Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return” · View on HN
Because left wing rhetoric comes from grass roots ground up sort of activism. Right wing rhetoric is much smoother because they have full marketing teams and PR backing them. One is organic. One is designed. Organic movements are messy. Carefully designed messages are nice and succinct. One example of right wing consolidation around their designed messaging: ▶ this video
in “The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance” · View on HN
> That's complete and utter conspiracy nonsense because control implicates intentions, but the media - and especially social media - are not directed by a uniform actor with intentions. In most places the media landscape is a oligopoly [0], even social media doesn't evade that pitfall, only a handful of companies dominate that whole space. And while on social media these companies are not always supplying the content, they are very much the gatekeepers about what kind of content is allowed in the first place and what content they aggregate to whom [1]. That is a very powerful position to be in and the results can be observed for years already with filter bubbles based on extremely warped Overton windows and an increasingly centralized world wide web [2] Giving all kinds of media a blank pass, as not doing so would allegedly be fascism, just trivializes a very real problem. [0] ▶ this video [1] [link] [2] [link]
in “The CIA's Quest for Mind Control: Torture, LSD and a 'Poisoner in Chief'” · View on HN
Sinclair is the same broadcasting station featured in the terror-inducing "This is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy" video ▶ this video
in “Woman who designed Florida's Covid-19 dashboard removed from her position” · View on HN
Right that would be extremely dangerous to our democracy[1] Only the TV and mainstream media are allowed to manipulate opinions. [1] ▶ this video
in “We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness” · View on HN
This line of argumentation is always so strange to me because it supposes a strange sort of emotional fragility in the rich that I can't quite square with the exceptionalism we allllll know they possess. You think the dominant narrative is that America is a racist hellscape? No, no; America is the greatest country on the planet. I heard it on the news. Surely the increasingly consolidated media, owned by the emotionally-fragile rich, could address the dominance of that narrative? Failure to come together to address such a horrifying distortion of reality, after all, would be extremely dangerous to our democracy[0]. In seriousness, I think that your conclusion that the rich are leaving because of culture-war issues is unsupported by the assertion that the dominant narrative is that Murica sucks. The dominant narrative is that America is the land of the free, dude. Unpleasant realities like Trump profiting from the Secret Service having to stay at his hotels, or the dynastic nature of Presidential politics, or how the IRS goes after the poor for lack of the funding that hitting the big-time cheats would require, or how three of the most recent dynasties had ties to an infamous pedophile, or how that pedophile "killed himself" while in high-profile protective custody -- it's all unimportant. Propaganda both subtle and gross smooths things over. The Pledge of Allegiance seems very, very strange to many other cultures, especially Western ones. I think it's far more likely that the
in “Wealthy people are renouncing American citizenship” · View on HN
No. Determining truth is a hard problem, and trusting huge corporations to arbitrate truth for us is extremely dangerous to our democracy[0]. [0] ▶ this video
in “YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation” · View on HN