Sinclair Broadcast Group, the conservative syndicate that is the nation's largest television broadcaster, will soon reach three-quarters of American households. That massive expansion, as Politico reported on Sunday, was made possible thanks to Ajit Pai, who President Donald Trump appointed to chair the Federal Communications Commission just two days after taking office. (Pai was initially appointed to the FCC by Barack Obama; Trump elevated him to chair before renewing Pai's five-year term.)

Given Sinclair's unusually favorable coverage of Trump during the campaign, it's easy to assume this is a quid pro quo, more evidence of the corruption and grift that drives the Trump administration. And it may well be that. But using the FCC to advance political goals has been a bipartisan tradition in the modern White House. What should alarm Americans more is neither Trump's use of a regulatory agency as a political tool, nor the immediate impact of Sinclair's expansion. No, the biggest worry here is the way the move will shape the American media landscape in the long term, especially once Republicans are out of power.

Trump's decision to appoint a sympathetic FCC chair is hardly a break with tradition. Upon taking office in 1981, Ronald Reagan, someone who like Trump was well-versed in the ways of entertainment and communication technologies, picked Mark Fowler to head the agency. Fowler spent his six years as chair assiduously working to find a way to dismantle the Fairness Doctrine, a regulatory standard that many conservatives believed was a way of keeping the right off the airwaves. Fowler succeeded. Thirty years ago this month, the FCC scrapped the Fairness Doctrine. Congress has never been able to reinstate it.

Nor was it only Republicans who monkeyed with the FCC. The Kennedy administration sought to use the agency, along with the IRS, to combat conservative broadcasters and organizations.

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But while the FCC can help shape the contours of the media landscape, it takes more for ideological media – be it conservative, liberal, or left-wing – to thrive. One of the biggest requirements? Being out of power.

Reagan held the levers of power for eight years, but he did not oversee a revival of conservative media. Far from it: National right-wing media languished in the Reagan years. It wasn't until later that conservative broadcasting flourished. Rush Limbaugh, whose syndicated show went national in 1988, became a household name in the early 1990s, when the right felt first abandoned by George H. W. Bush's administration and then embattled by Bill Clinton's. Fox News went live in the midst of the Clinton re-election campaign.

True, these efforts were aided by the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. But they needed something more, a sense of being under siege, of being shut out from traditional modes of political influence.

The same phenomenon happened on the left: Air America launched in 2004 in the heart of George W. Bush administration. MSNBC decided to start leaning left in the mid-2000s as well. And while neither broadcaster proved as influential – or as profitable – as their counterparts on the right, they illustrated that the left, too, could play the ideological media game, so long as they were out of power.

Those same dynamics are at play in the Trump administration. Fox's ratings are down, MSNBC's are up. Liberal and left-wing podcasts are emerging as the left's answer to talk radio. But more than that – and perhaps a sign of the unusual anti-news stance of the Trump administration – subscriptions and profits are up at major non-ideological sources like the New York Times and Washington Post. When it comes to the media, more Americans are looking for antidotes to the Trump line, not supplements to it.

That spike in support for liberal and left-wing outlets may lull some anti-Trumpers into complacence. But like the Fairness Doctrine before it, the Sinclair expansion could have a huge impact in the long run. Just as the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine seemed to remove all barriers not just to ideological broadcasters but to station owners who wanted to run wall-to-wall right-wing programming, so too could the Sinclair administration lay the groundwork for a new form of news, a conservative news that Americans imbibe without ever knowing their news has a specific political agenda.