Remember how the evening before Montana’s special election, the Republican billionaire candidate Greg Gianforte was caught on tape and in front of numerous witnesses, assaulting a reporter for asking him about healthcare? Reports came out and were quickly confirmed by both audio recordings and witness accounts of what happened. Interestingly, the NBC affiliate in Montana, KECI didn’t cover any of that news. Maybe they forgot?
New York has learned that KECI news director Julie Weindel was called by NBC News to see if KECI would cover the story or had any footage of the Gianforte incident that NBC News and its affiliates could use. A well-placed source familiar with communications between KECI news director Julie Weindel and NBC News says that she was unyielding in her refusal to share any footage she may have had access to, or run a report on the incident. According to the source, Weindel said that they weren’t covering the story, though it was featured in outlets across the country at the time, explaining, “The person that tweeted [Jacobs] and was allegedly body slammed is a reporter for a politically biased publication.” Weindel then added, “You are on your own for this.”
Weindel told New York Magazine that all that stuff is both “out of context” and also “a private email” correspondence. An interesting juxtaposition of both denial and “how did you find out?”
“Like any responsible journalist with unconfirmed accounts, we needed to be confident that we were able to verify the information and report the facts,” she said, adding that at the time there were no “clear and undisputed” facts. “We were eventually able to confirm, and we did aggressively report the facts of the story, the investigation, and the assault citation, based on the sheriff’s information and press conference, which we covered and sent in its entirely to NBC and MSNBC immediately,” she said
The Missoulian explains that KECI has been bought by right-wing nuthouse broadcasting giant the Sinclair Broadcast Group.
Sinclair announced Friday that it has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase the stock of Bonten Media Group Holdings, Inc. for $240 million.
Bonten owns 14 television stations in eight markets, which reach approximately 1 percent of U.S. TV households. In Montana, Bonten owns KECI in Missoula, KTVM in Butte and Bozeman and KCFW in Kalispell, which are all NBC affiliates.
If you don’t remember the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, they own an army of local broadcasting stations and have been growing ever since, recently purchasing Tribune Media in Illinois. Sinclair Broadcasting Group is the same crew of right-wing nutcases that pre-empted normal programming in the two weeks leading up to the 2004 presidential election to run the bogus attack documentary that claimed Senator John Kerry was a Vietnam traitor who gave up POWs to the enemy. More recently, they were one of the two organizations that Trump took questions from during his February press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. I think their reporter asked the hard question “Why are you so bigly and awesome President Commander Leader?”