CRAIG AARON: This video that was made by the sports website Deadspin showing all of these local anchors being forced to read the same script about so-called “fake news” has really broken through and really vastly increased public awareness of what Sinclair does. From just a few stations and their base in Baltimore, they now control close to 200 local television stations nationwide. And they are trying to take over the TV stations owned by the Tribune company, which would give them access to much bigger markets than they’ve ever been in before, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Hartford, Connecticut and on and on. Sinclair has gone out of its way for several decades to evade every FCC rule limiting their growth and expansion. And now they have an FCC that instead of trying to contain them, is aiding and betting their massive growth. So just on that alone is reason to oppose Sinclair – that kind of size, all of this cookie cutter content.But what Sinclair does in addition to this astronomical growth is they push a right-wing ideology. They force all of their local stations to carry content – extremely conservative content – and sneak it into their regular newscast. So, between sports, weather and traffic, you’ll find former Donald Trump campaign manager Boris Epstein reading talking points that come straight out of the White House. You’ll find former Ben Carson; campaign manager Armstrong Williams, a longtime Sinclair crony, sharing his views, and you’ll find all sorts of very, very slanted content, that is scapegoating Muslim Americans and attacking Black Lives Matter activists and just generally pushing in what is otherwise sort of a normal local newscast, these extremist viewpoints. So you put that all together, you have this company, Sinclair pushing content that would be far to the right even if it was on Fox News channel on hundreds of stations at the local level and they built this media empire and that, you know, here we are close to 200 stations and people are finally paying attention maybe for the first time that the threat this company poses to local viewpoints – and really, fundamentally to our democracy.
BETWEEN THE LINES: As I understand it, the FCC is poised to grant the green light for this proposed merger between Sinclair and Tribune media, which as you said earlier, would give Sinclair more than 230 stations nationwide. But on the other side of this, we’ve also heard about an internal investigation within the FCC about some of the policies directed by Trump’s appointed FCC chair, Ajit Pai. Tell us about the investigation going on within the FCC right now.
CRAIG AARON: You know, as soon as Donald Trump was elected, Sinclair was popping the champagne. They were running around all the investor conferences saying, “We’re going to get rid of the limits on media ownership in this country.” And you know, this was a company that had a lot to do with electing Donald Trump. Jared Kushner told people they had a deal with Sinclair – sort of uncut coverage of Trump – and you know, Donald Trump didn’t create Sinclair, but Sinclair certainly had a lot to do with creating Trump. And they expected to cash in.
And almost from Day One, Ajit Pai’s FCC has gone out of his way to bend the rules or erase the rules to benefit Sinclair. Then Ajit Pai teed up a whole series of rule changes, getting rid of requirements for Sinclair to operate a studio in the stations with the license to serve, getting rid of limits on how many stations one company can own in a market, blessing these sort of sham front group operations that Sinclair is using to push through this deal where they hand over the license to one of their cronies, who then immediately signs the contract, giving them control of the operations of the station.
That’s now being blessed by the FCC. And after some inquiries from Congress, the inspector general at the FCC has launched an investigation to see what’s going on here, was there undue influence from Sinclair? You know, I would argue that Ajit Pai shouldn’t be considering this deal. The other thing is we’re going to be challenging this deal in court. We think the rule changes the FCC made were made without evidence. They were made without public input, so we’ve got two cases already pending in federal court to challenge this deal. So it’s not done yet, but there is no question that the Trump administration and the FCC in particular absolutely aided and abetted this deal at every turn.
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