Do you have any relatives that live in rural American? Wonder why their political sensibilities are so foreign and far different than yours? Does it ever seem at times the is a complete misalignment in the basic facts and current news that they quote?

Well, look no further than Sinclair; a national broadcast news conglomerate that is very prominent in rural areas, and is well on its way to monopolizing all of your local news.

If you don’t know by now, Sinclair is a ultra-right wing broadcaster that has been infiltrating rural news networks for a number of years. What they do is this: buy out a small local TV affiliate, let them keep their local news anchors, let them do their local news, BUT insist that certain news stories make the broadcast. For example, stories about immigrants killing border patrol, loss of jobs in certain red states, the evils of the Clintons, etc, need to be on the news slate or else the funding will be terminated.

And how effective has this been? Well, it took a few years, but we are now seeing the polarizing effect. Smalltown USA is redder than the Kool-Aid man and have been completely swayed by Trump-TV (not my moniker for Sinclair).

Now at first this may seem like small potatoes; I mean how much effect do little towns in Wyoming and Kentucky really have on the national political landscape. Well, think about this; every state gets 2 senators. California gets 2, Montana gets 2. California is 40x more than Montana. Well how about South Dakota and Illinois; Illinois is 14x bigger. So there is a built-in over-representation of small states.

Now let’s go to national voting; California has 55, Montana has 3, Alaska has 3, Idaho has 4, the Dakotas have 6. California has 3.5x as many electoral votes and has 8x more people……in all those states combined! In other words, even for presidential elections, small states are over-represented. So much for one man, one vote.

So you can see how this strategy by Sinclair has been so effective. But don’t you worry, Sinclair is now setting their sights on larger cities. With this proposed merger with Tribune Media, Sinclair’s reach will even be vaster. Even in the blue city of Seattle, one of our local affiliates (KOMO-4, ABC) has been bitten by the Sinclair bug. And I would bet dimes to dollars that this merger will be championed by the president, unlike his rebuking of the TimeWarner/CNN merger.

Wonder why………

Anyway, this is some serious stuff. Please refer to your local news broadcasts and see which media outlets Sinclair has poisoned. You may not even know which one’s on the surface, but there is a very good chance one is lurking in the shadows of your local TV stations.