Ben Shapiro writes at DailyWire:

Over the weekend, mass panic broke out among media types over Sinclair Broadcasting's use of local anchors across the country to push out a message about the prevalence of unvetted stories on social media.

After providing video of the Sinclair message -- and a transcript -- Shapiro offers this analysis:

Now, here's the thing: the actual text of this universally-issued missive has nothing to do with Trump. Go ahead. Check it. There's nothing about Trump there.

And complaints about one-sided news and "sharing of false and biased" news on social media have been absolutely common on the Left. If this same message were read by Brian Stelter on CNN, word for word, nobody would have any problem with it.

The media are simply assuming that the message is pro-Trump because Sinclair's owners are pro-Trump. But the ads aren't for Trump: they're a plea for viewers to keep watching rather than turning off the TV and using Facebook for news consumption -- the exact same plea made every day in the pages of The New York Times, at MSNBC, and in the halls of Congress by Democrats who claim that social media won Trump the election.

"The leftist media's universal rush to condemn Sinclair for the message is actually more lockstep political than Sinclair's message, which is lockstep but not political," Shapiro continues.

"Kimmel's tweet is actually more telling than it looks: all the statements about Sinclair being 'dangerous for our democracy' are just as collectivized and unanimous, and far more political, than Sinclair's top-down edict to read an apolitical message on air," Shapiro concludes.

By the way, a "majority of Americans -- 77 percent -- said traditional news outlets are 'fake news,' according to a Monmouth University poll published Monday," the Washington Times reports today.

The need for honest, objective reporting -- that is, real journalism -- is greater than ever.