The Sinclair Revolution Will Be Televised. It’ll Just Have Low Production Values

In the menagerie of television talking heads who have come to prominence advocating for Donald Trump, Boris Epshteyn is hardly the most memorable. Yet he’s perhaps the best surrogate to study if you want to understand where the Trump/TV industrial complex goes next. Epshteyn briefly worked in the White House—the job ended not long after Politico reported that he’d gotten into a “yelling match” with a booker at Fox News—but since April he’s been employed as the chief political analyst for the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair is likely to get larger yet.

In May the company announced it was buying Tribune Media Co. for $3.9 billion. Among other assets, Sinclair would add 42 TV stations—including major ones in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—if the deal is approved by regulators. The expansion wouldn’t have been possible if President Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, hadn’t voted a few weeks earlier to ease a major restriction on local media ownership...President Trump remains a protected figure on Sinclair airwaves. Even as the company has occasionally furnished its stations with ads made to look like journalism, it’s adopted President Trump’s tactic of hammering its competitors for producing “fake news.”