Nexstar and Sinclair Are Bad News

The Kimmel boycott is over but these two companies are not done attacking free speech, polluting the airwaves and hurting local news

Illustration by Riley Levine

I’m glad the Sinclair-Nexstar boycott of the Jimmy Kimmel show is over. It was a blatant attack on free speech that never should have happened. But this is Donald Trump’s America, and if you aren’t in his good graces, you can expect the President of the United States, his government, and his friendly oligarchs to try to silence you.

In Trump’s America, the guy in charge decides what wealthy owners can and cannot do. Their wealth is tied to his favor. The more they do his bidding, the more he allows them to flourish. The more they resist, the more he cuts others in.

Bending the knee and distorting content in Trump’s favor resulted in benefits for companies like the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CBS News, Facebook, and Twitter. After their capitulation, the door opened to fat government contracts, reduced regulations, merger approvals, and access to power. This is a corrupt oligarchy, and two of the nation’s largest owners of broadcast television stations, Sinclair and Nexstar, want in.

These two giant companies kept the Kimmel ban alive even after ABC reversed and returned his show to the airwaves, and they are not done meddling with the country’s politics or media diet. Membership in the oligarchy has its obligations.

Sinclair and Nexstar already pollute the airwaves with highly partisan, pro-Donald Trump, sometimes corporate-mandated, often factually inaccurate slop every single day.

What else will they be willing to do to further the agenda of an authoritarian U.S. President? What deals will they make to secure significant regulatory changes so they can expand their right wing media empires? With billions at stake, you can bet that they will not stop with the Kimmel boycott.

Follow the Oligarch Money

The United States regulates commerce for the benefit of the American people.Those regulations cover things like how much pollution can come from a smokestack, what counts as a seat belt, and, as it relates to television, how many stations a single owner can control.

There are 861 local television stations in the country and together Sinclair and Nexstar own or operate nearly half of them plus cable news networks and other media properties. Nexstar is the largest owner of local stations with more than 200 in 116 markets, Sinclair is number two with 185 stations in 85 markets. And they are angling for more.

Nexstar has a pending merger with Tegna to acquire 64 more stations, but the merger can only happen if Donald Trump and his FCC Chair Brendan Carr agree to lift the decades old ownership caps. As Deadline’s Dade Hayes reports, the resulting company would “have 265 stations in 44 states and the District of Columbia, representing 80% of U.S. TV households. That footprint far exceeds the longtime 39% limit on ownership of stations, which had been kept in place by both Republican and Democratic administrations over the past three decades.”

After the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning the Chevron doctrine during Biden’s administration, it isn’t clear that the Trump-controlled agencies have the authority to lift the cap. It is clear, however, that Attorney General Pam Bondi will look the other way if Trump wants to reward Nexstar for its obedience. Ditto for Sinclair, which also wants regulatory changes to allow for its expansion plans. Can anyone doubt the Oligarchic money game is what motivated both companies to help a Trump coordinated attack on Kimmel?

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Enemies of Journalism and Democracy

Pending mergers or not, Sinclair and Nexstar already have a staggering amount of power to influence both the information and entertainment beamed to millions of Americans. They also have a record that favors right wing power over free speech and American democracy.

We saw that when they pulled Kimmel’s show off their collective 60 ABC affiliated stations for over a week. Fully 30% of the country couldn’t watch the show once it returned after the ABC suspension. I could watch Kimmel in Chicago, but the show was blocked in large parts of Illinois. The same was true in states like New York, Oregon, Ohio, and Michigan. In Utah, that entire state had a Kimmel blackout. What happens if another network airs content that angers Trump or inspires the MAGA hordes to rise up again? I think we already know the answer: Sinclair and Nexstar will not stand up for journalism or democracy.

Sinclair has long been an enemy of both. You’ve likely heard of Sinclair. It’s hard to forget the company that infamously required its local news anchors to read the same script, word for word, mimicking Trump’s complaints about fake news. That 2017 incident almost seems quaint compared to the level of editorial interference Sinclair engages in now. Must-run content produced by Sinclair’s so-called “National Desk,” DC bureau, and “Rapid Response” team spew daily from its many local stations and their social media platforms.

Sinclair has also helped weaken local news. It has completely closed the newsrooms in at least 10 of its stations around the country. Instead of local journalists reporting local news, Sinclair runs all or segments from its extremely biased and fact-free “National Desk” program. Now Sinclair is also pushing the idea of a content minder. After ending its Kimmel boycott, the Baltimore-based company said it wanted a “network-wide independent ombudsman” to help strengthen “trust and accountability.”

That in-house censor demand is eerily similar to what the new owners of CBS News did to appease the Trump administration during the Skydance-Paramount merger. Fortunately, ABC has not agreed to any “editorial or content concessions,” at least for now. But don’t expect this content minder idea to go away.

Who Owns your Local Television Station?

Local news builds trust and builds community. Even now, studies show local news organizations are trusted far more than national ones. But in the hands of Sinclair and Nexstar, local news is much less local. You may not even realize if Nexstar or Sinclair owns one or more of your favorite local television stations. When you see the same anchors doing the 6pm news and Chicago Fire still comes on every Wednesday at 8pm, it can seem like nothing has changed. But it has.

Years ago, I worked for a CBS affiliate in Champaign, Illinois that was owned by a local family. Now it’s part of Nexstar’s mega company. So instead of owners that live down the street from their viewers and are actively engaged in the local community, WCIA-TV is run by people in Texas. Something important is lost when anonymous people with no local connection make content decisions from an office 850-miles away. And if that boss has a particular political ideology, it can and does impact the news content and other local programming decisions.

One of my former WCIA colleagues told me:

“I fear for the future of affiliates without legacy/heritage ownership of people truly interested in community service and public service journalism. I long for the era of family-owned or locally-owned stations that truly cared about the public interest, ascertainments, communities and serving the viewer. They can market themselves as such but rarely fulfill the mission.”

Nexstar also owns Chicago’s iconic WGN-TV. When I ran the news operation there, the owners were a few miles away in downtown Chicago and they embraced the station’s local mission. Under Nexstar, the station fondly known as “Chicago’s Very Own” doesn’t appear to have changed its editorial content significantly yet. But the company’s cable outlet down the hall from the WGN newsroom surely has. Many excellent local Chicago journalists helped launch Nexstar’s “NewsNation” but they soon left in disgust as the network veered right, censored some Covid content and even secretly hired a former Fox News boss. Now it’s harder and harder to tell the fledgling cable network apart from Fox.

Former WGN news anchor Joan Esposito told me:

“Back in my day when the right leaning Tribune company owned WGN there was never interference in our news output that I was aware of, and frankly if there had been, we would have been reviled. We would have lost viewers. Viewers back then expected truth and facts not bias. It was a simpler time. The current owner “Nextstar was originally sold (at least in Chicago) as a no BS, tell it like it is, news organization. I don’t know if that was a lie at the beginning but it’s clearly a lie now. And why pretend anymore when their good friend Trump clearly will favor right wing content?“

Time to Change the Channel

Oligarchies are powerful, but as we proved in the Kimmel case, so are Americans. Find out who owns your local television station. Here’s the current list of those Nexstar and Sinclair stations. If it’s Sinclair, stop watching. Propaganda is not news. Even if you have watched that station for years, change the channel. Today. If it’s Nexstar, let the station know you value fact-based journalism and protest if and when it veers away from that. And tune out the right wing content on News Nation completely.

As the Kimmel spectacle showed, voting with your pocketbook does work. Angry viewers not only called their local stations to protest, they also threatened boycotts of the local and national advertisers on those stations. Of course, Disney took a huge hit for pulling Kimmel off the air as consumers canceled millions of streaming subscriptions.

Like many industries, journalism is in transition. In one possible future, all our news comes from a handful of companies that Donald Trump trusts. In another, Americans get their news from sources we trust. Happily, a growing body of independent local journalism in America now reports fearlessly in communities across the country. Organizations like Press Forward, Rebuild Local News, the Institute for Nonprofit News and the American Journalism Project support local news and help stand up many of these newsrooms.

Find news you trust. Support the organizations that provide it. It’s as easy as changing the channel.

Jennifer Schulze is a longtime Chicago journalist. She’s on Bluesky @newsjennifer.bsky.social and Substack at “Indistinct Chatter.” Read the original column here.