How the nation’s largest owner of TV stations helped Donald Trump’s campaign

Over four days in early August, Donald Trump gave interviews to four TV stations in Ohio, Florida and Maine, and to the Washington bureau of a national TV chain. The interviews were a coup for the stations, which eagerly promoted their “one-on-one” encounters with the GOP nominee. They were also an effective way for Trump to target voting blocs in key states, particularly since he had begun limiting his national media exposure largely to friendly interviewers on Fox News. The most striking thing about the interviews, however, may be that one company was behind all of them: Sinclair Broadcast Group.

The Maryland-based company is the nation’s largest owner of TV stations, with 173 in 81 cities nationwide, including those that interviewed Trump in August. The Washington bureau was Sinclair’s, too; it provided its interview with Trump to Sinclair’s many stations for their newscasts. Sinclair, which has drawn criticism for favoring conservative candidates before, says it had no special arrangement with Trump’s campaign and that it didn’t favor him at the expense of his main rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton. It also said it offered equal time to Clinton and solicited interviews with her throughout the campaign, but her managers responded less enthusiastically than Trump.