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In 2004, with the re-election effort of George W. Bush in full swing, I was asked to become an on-air contributor for Sinclair — which was not well known at the time — a Baltimore-based entity owned by right-wing brothers with the perfectly banal name Smith. I was hired to be a political analyst. In reality, this most often meant appearing in debate segments against both a conservative pundit and a Bush-administration-glorifying news host.

The station’s far-right slant went well beyond that setup, to a place that should be troubling for a democracy that values a free press. I saw numerous sets of talking points and scripts for anchors to read on-air arguing that George W. Bush was “winning” the war on terror, smiting “feckless Democrats” trying to undermine the United States.

Two journalists employed at Sinclair at the time told me how a company executive sent them to Iraq with “instructions” to cover “positive” narratives of the war. When each of them also returned with more accurate, nuanced stories of bloodshed, chaos, civilian lives lost and casualties among United States troops, most of these accounts were placed on the back burner, never to be seen again.

I once asked a top editor about the overwhelmingly conservative culture throughout Sinclair management, and he, a self-described “Lieberman Democrat,” admitted with a chuckle that the ownership and executives were strongly right wing. That included my usual counterpoint, Armstrong Williams, the conservative pundit and Smith brothers business partner. Mr. Williams, most recently an adviser for the ill-fated effort by Ben Carson to best Mr. Trump in the Republican presidential primaries, would eventually be exposed as having been paid $240,000 by the Bush administration to covertly propagandize in favor of its No Child Left Behind initiative during those media appearances with me and others.