Sinclair Media is, after Fox News, the most powerful conservative propagandist in the nation. They pepper your Sinclair-owned local news segments with "must run" segments from their stable of hard-right, often-more-than-a-little-loopy commentators and other slanted takes from the home office. They are hardline Trump supporters, and frothing opponents of non-conservative policies.
Their purchase of 42 new stations will put them in almost three quarters of American households. That sort of nationwide reach is supposed to be barred by federal regulation, but Trump's FCC chairman found a way to make it happen.
Sinclair, already the nation’s largest TV broadcaster, plans to buy 42 stations from Tribune Media in cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, on top of the more than 170 stations it already owns. It got a critical assist this spring from Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who revived a decades-old regulatory loophole that will keep Sinclair from vastly exceeding federal limits on media ownership. [...]
The change will allow Sinclair — a company known for injecting "must run" conservative segments into its local programming — to reach 72 percent of U.S. households after buying Tribune’s stations. That’s nearly double the congressionally imposed nationwide audience cap of 39 percent.
The "loophole" is that back in the days of not-digital television, UHF stations were counted toward the cap at a much-reduced rate because UHF signal quality was usually unimpressive. It was discarded as no longer valid or meaningful; Pai brought it back at the request of Sinclair and other broadcasters, who wanted it back because of course they did. And that, and only that, is what will now allow Sinclair Media access to seven in ten American homes.
Whether this is merely the standard crony corporatism of today's Republicans or something more is difficult to pin down. As Politico notes, new chairman Pai had multiple meetings with Sinclair's own heads before Trump's inauguration, when he was considered the likely pick for chairman; we presume these were friendly chats outlining what sort of regulatory burdens Sinclair would like to be relieved of, in the Trump era, and once installed in the post Pai has taken swift action on multiple fronts in ways that are of particular benefit to Sinclair. (This one stands out because it's the revival of an archaic, already-tossed regulation in order to benefit the company—in the midst of an administration-announced regulatory purge. That takes a bit of chutzpah.)
Sinclair, in turn, is among the most reliable ally and defender of hard-right, Donald Trump-led conservatism in the nation. Not even Fox News is as consistently obsequious to the cause. The rapid expansion of Sinclair, made possible by multiple regulatory assists by Trump's new FCC head, is of conspicuous benefit to the administration and its allies.
That is the sort of thing that American political experts would be deeply suspicious of, if it happened in most other nations. We consider dominance of a nation's media by pro-regime allies requiring local anchors to present regular pro-regime commentaries to be antithetical to democracy. We considered it dangerous enough to specifically regulate against, in fact—only to find out that many other things, in the Trump era, the established rules were not so iron-clad as we thought.