Lest we be tempted to applaud the Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s Friday decision to put Jimmy Kimmel back on the air in cities like Seattle and St. Louis and Tulsa and Birmingham and Little Rock and Roanoke and Washington D.C. – thus lifting its blackout at 38 ABC affiliates – it behooves us to remember this company’s “news” operation is a font of right-wing disinformation in service to the MAGA mission.
I’ve been writing about Sinclair on and off since 2018, fascinated as I am with its confluence of capitalism and authoritarianism. Sometimes its MAGA messaging has all the subtlety of a military jackboot marching across one’s skull. Sometimes – as we just saw the other day, on a story of serious national import – Sinclair simply lies by omission, secure in its quest to keep millions of Americans egregiously ill-informed.
On Thursday, Trump’s toadying Justice Department, acting at his specific behest, indicted James Comey, the ex-FBI director and longtime Trump foe, for allegedly making several false statements in a Senate hearing five years ago.
Sinclair has something it calls “The National Desk,” which writes stories for the websites of its 294 TV stations, and its Comey indictment story was classic Sinclair – not for what it said, but for all the relevant facts that were left unsaid.
That story featured two long quotes from Trump’s social media account and finished with a predictable comment from Trump’s press secretary. That was all.
But here’s the crucial factual material that somehow did not make the cut:
1. The story didn’t mention the original federal prosecutor – a Trump appointee – quit his job rather than push for an indictment on charges he believed were baseless or insufficient to indict.
2. The story didn’t mention his successor, an insurance attorney who has never prosecuted a single case, was appointed by Trump just days ago, and rushed the criminal charges in front of a grand jury despite fervent opposition from her subordinates, career professional prosecutors who believed the charges were baseless or insufficient to indict.
3. The story didn’t say this new prosecutor had been working in the White House staff secretary’s office when Trump plucked her for the big job.
4. The story didn’t mention she moved to indict Comey at Trump’s command despite the fact Trump had preemptively declared on social media Comey is “guilty as hell” – a prejudicial statement that Comey’s lawyers can cite as evidence their client can’t get a fair trial.
5. The story didn’t mention the indictment is itself unprecedented, that the norm ever since Watergate 50 years ago is the Justice Department operates independent of the White House, free from extreme presidential pressure.
Nor did the story say that even if Comey’s indictment is ultimately dismissed, the fact it even happened sends a message to others who dare to dissent, that they too could wind up on trial if they displease a “leader” who deems vengeance to be more important than evidence.
So that’s Sinclair at its most insidious. More often, it prefers the frontal assault.
Sinclair has a “National Desk” TV show that runs on a wide swath of Sinclair affiliates. In January 2024 it lost its lead anchor, Eugene Ramirez, who quit because he could no longer abide the stories he was required to put on the air. The stories, often inaccurate or tilted rightward without proper context, were typically culled from Republican and conservative group press releases. (Example: Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill would cost “$400 trillion.” That lie was off by $399 trillion.)
Ramirez was also admonished by corporate higher-ups for disputing dubious claims made by the show’s right-wing guests; Ramirez was ordered not to interrupt them.
Such episodes are too numerous to list. In 2017, Sinclair HQ ordered its local outlets to air thrice-weekly segments starring “political correspondent” Boris Epshteyn, a Russian-born Trump apparatchik who parrots MAGA. In 2018, people at HQ wrote Trump promotional pieces and ordered the local outlets’ anchors to read the pieces on the air “exactly as they are written” – prompting angry employees at one Sinclair station to warn, in an article posted on Vox, that “Sinclair management is turning up the heat on pro-Trump content and we, the journalists at this station are the frogs in the pot.”
As are we all.
And stripping stories of factual context – to wit, its coverage of the Comey indictment – dumbs down the citizenry and ups the ambient heat. Putting Kimmel back on the air was just a strategic concession; Sinclair plays the long game and remains staunchly on the march.
Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]