Whoops: Sinclair Broadcasting Airs Sponcon Featuring White Nationalist Who Wants Travis Kelce Executed For Vaccine Advocacy

Generally, when you talk about disinformation or propaganda, big tech" companies like Facebook, or media giants like Fox News get the lion's share of the attention. But as I've often noted, local news outlets in the U.S. were hollowed out years ago by mindless consolidation, and were ultimately replaced with something thatlookslike news, but is generally just gibberish and propaganda.

At the heart of this movement sits Sinclair Broadcasting, as the old (and actually interesting) version of Deadspin made clear in this video from a few years back:

You might recall Sinclair from that time it got caught lying to regulators during its failed acquisition of Tribune (it tried to hide assets to pretend the merger didn't violate ever-shrinking media consolidation limits). Or that time one of their reporters tried to act as if a white supremacist gathering in Seattle was some kind of valid community outreach effort akin to a Cub Scout bake sale.

Now Sinclair is finding itself in headlines once again after 16 Sinclair-owned stations sponsored a gold investment segment featuring far-right podcasterStew Peters, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who has called for the execution of journalists and politicians."

Sinclair's response? Whoops a daisy, we just hadn't even noticed this guy had called for the execution of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce for vaccine advocacy, spreads anti-vaccine propaganda and openly advocates for the murder of LGBTQ people:

We were not aware of the association and are reviewing our internal policies on sponsored content. The segment in question is no longer on our air," a Sinclair Broadcasting Group spokesperson told Media Matters."

Except normalizing far right extremism and white supremacy isn't out of character for the local broadcast giant, which currently owns 294 local television stations across 89 U.S. markets. For many users in these markets, Sinclair's homogenized right wing propaganda is about as close as they get to consuming actual news. It's a fact that's oddly never mentioned when polling trends are discussed.

While many try to argue that kind of propaganda doesn't matter or is somehow overstated, when you talk to academics who study it for a living, they'll be quick to tell you the replacement of genuine local news with this kind of disingenuous dreck (at unprecedented scale) not only matters, it canincrease partisan extremism, make people measurably less informed (opening the door to greater local corruption), and even shift elections.

Again, as the newspaper industry was disrupted, some things changed for the better. The death of meaningful, quality local reporting wasn't among them. Not only was quality local news killed off in the United States due to low profitability, into the vacuum has surged all manner of dangerous garbage, including pseudo-news propaganda mills (aka pink slime) run by dodgy political operatives that are even less ethical than Sinclair Broadcasting executives.

Absolutely any effort to do absolutely anything whatsoever about the massive propaganda apparatus the U.S. right wing has built over a generation (across Fox News, YouTube, Infowars, Sinclair, OANN, Newsmax, Daily Caller, and now ex-Twitter) is immediately framed as Conservative censorship," ensuring that any productive, creative solutions never actually materialize.

There's a lot we could do to address the problem. We could revisit media antitrust reform. We could re-establish media consolidation limits stripped away by lobbyists. We could develop creative, cogent new ways to fund independent journalism. But Congress isn't interested in any of that, ensuring that huge swaths of the public continue to have their heads filled with hatred and pebbles on a daily basis.