Trump’s Thank You Gift to the Nation’s Worst Local TV News Owner

Sinclair uses its nearly 200 stations as a MAGA megaphone. Now it can gobble up even more stations after a recent move by Trump's FCC.

Jennifer Schulze is a longtime Chicago journalist. She’s on Bluesky @newsjennifer.bsky.social. Subscribe to her Substack, Indistinct Chatter.

Sinclair Broadcasting is continues to be one of Donald Trump’s biggest, most reliable media boosters. With nearly 200 local television stations scattered across the country, it’s a powerful MAGA megaphone, especially during election season. The station group is also ready to step in when the Trump administration needs extra help punishing its enemies, as we saw when Sinclair led the Jimmy Kimmel boycott.

Now Trump is rewarding Sinclair’s loyalty, delivering a major policy change that Sinclair has sought for years: the end of the local TV station ownership cap that helped prevent any one company from owning too many stations and having too much influence on the country’s media diet.

Trump’s Federal Communications Commission voted 2-1 earlier this month to do away with the decades-old cap. While it’s not the first regulatory change the Trump administration has executed to help Sinclair, it is surely the most significant. It means Sinclair is no longer restricted to just 200 stations — an already obscene amount for any one owner. Now, it can gobble up as many stations as it wants, spreading its right wing disinformation even further.

Nexstar, which owns 265 local stations, also lobbied hard for the change and made its content more Trump-friendly to help seal the deal. Trump had already approved a merger between Nexstar and TEGNA that would add 64 stations to Nexstar’s group, making its increasingly right-wing content available to 90% of the country. That merger — which required an FCC waiver of the ownership cap that Carr easily granted — is frozen as the issue plays out in court. Of course, David Ellison’s Paramount/WBD merger is also in court right now and chances are that this controversial FCC ownership cap decision will wind up there, too.

One of the many groups opposed to all of these media mergers and the end to the ownership cap is the nonpartisan consumer watchdog group, The Media and Democracy Project. Executive Director Milo Vassallo told me:

“Chairman Carr is lying when he says that consolidation will allow local communities to “compete” with YouTube, and Amazon in the modern information age. He’s deceptively using the sympathetic story of the ‘little guy’ — when that he’s selectively empowering a couple MAGA-approved conglomerates led by right-wing allies such as Sinclair and Nexstar to become behemoths in their own right. You can be certain that if a Democratic-party aligned billionaire wanted to consolidate to owning 200 TV stations he’d oppose that faster than you can say, ‘First Amendment.’”

The Sinclair name may already ring a bell thanks to a shocking 2018 video compilation of numerous Sinclair local news anchors from its various stations all reading the same exact script. The topic? A Trump favorite: fake news. For many, that was the first introduction into how Sinclair uses its local stations to launder its highly partisan views and political attacks. They did it again in 2024 with grossly misleading coverage of then-President Biden’s age.

Copy cat articles from Sinclair station websites. Credit: Popular Information.

Journalists Aaron Rupar and Judd Legum uncovered the insidious coverage that played word for word on Sinclair stations nationwide and included copy cat articles on all of the station websites and social media platforms. Sinclair also eagerly laundered Republican National Committee drek throughout the 2024 campaign (as I wrote about here) and I think we should expect the same in the 2026 midterms.

Sinclair has been an active part of Trump’s political apparatus from the start. During Trump’s first term, the company notoriously struck a deal with Trump son-in-law Jared Krushner that guaranteed positive coverage of Trump in exchange for zero fact checking on the notorious liar. It also hired former Trump aide Boris Epshteyn to deliver as many as nine regular Trump friendly, must-run commentaries each week. Another daily must run were the “terrorism alert desk” segments that started in 2015 and continued into 2018.

Sinclair Helps Fight Trump’s Battles

In Trump’s second term, Sinclair continued to weaponize its network against the president’s enemies. The most notable incident, so far, involved late night talk show host and longtime Trump target, Jimmy Kimmel. When Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr both called for Kimmel to be punished for comments he made about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Sinclair called for a Kimmel boycott.

Then both Sinclair and Nexstar announced plans to preempt Kimmel from their multiple ABC stations prompting Disney/ABC to temporarily yank the show altogether. As CNN reported, the move sparked “speculation that the owners were trying to curry favor with the Trump administration. The local media conglomerates Nexstar and Tegna are each seeking a merger that would require administration approval.”

Oh, really.

Right now, Sinclair’s coverage is focused on typical MAGA obsessions like transgender athletes and the WNBA and Democratic Socialists. Like other MAGA media, Sinclair stations mostly ignore anything critical of Trump or the GOP and lean heavily into culture-war topics and crime. But unlike most MAGA media ,which splash their brightly colored logos on everything so you know exactly what channel you are watching, Sinclair seems to be hiding its corporate ownership.

Is a Sinclair Station Lurking in Your Community?

Chances are there’s a Sinclair station where you live — but you may not even know it. Sinclair is sneaky that way — hiding behind the local station’s well earned credibility and long established network affiliation like Local 12, NBC15, KUTV 2 CBS, My TV Pittsburgh, or KOMO ABC 4.

You have to dig deep to find any mention of Sinclair on Sinclair station broadcasts, websites, or social media platforms. There’s a Sinclair copyright on the very bottom of each station’s website, but that’s about it.

The deception extends to Sinclair’s national news efforts, as well. Sinclair’s daily streaming newscasts and the national news stories and must run content that displaces local news stories come from something they call “The National Desk.” Like everything else, there is no indication that Sinclair is the corporate owner, even though the bulk of the National Desk content is produced by Sinclair’s station in Washington, D.C. before being force-fed to the local stations.

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Change the Channel on Sinclair

It’s no secret that as a former local TV news reporter, producer and newsroom executive, I’m a big proponent of local television news. It remains the most trusted news in America, but Sinclair is trading on that trust to deliver its political propaganda.

People ask me all the time about recommended news sources. I’d start by saying figure out who owns the local television stations in your community and if it’s Sinclair, change the channel. I’d avoid Nexstar stations, too. Stick with local stations that are doing fact-based reporting about important community issues instead of sticking pro-Trump content in between the weather and sports.

If you want to get even more involved in the fight against the Sinclair (and Nexstar) domination of local news, you can also check out The Media and Democracy Project I mentioned above. The nonprofit Free Press (not to be confused with the right-coded Bari Weiss newsletter!) is also deep into the fight against the out of control FCC. I recommend signing up for its newsletter, Pressing Issues, to help stay on top of the merger twists and turns plus actions media consumers can take.