Embedded in Monday’s episode of Executive Time was a tweet in which the president* came to the defense of Sinclair Broadcasting’s Bot TV approach to local news.

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So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased. Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2018

There has been a lot of buzz around tout les toobz about this remarkable mashup of local Sinclair news readers essentially auditioning for jobs at Eyewitness News Stepford.

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As more than a few people have pointed out, this is a stunning example of what happens in a deregulated media market, something that media critics have been warning us about ever since the Reagan Administration went to town on the FCC. What some people seem to have forgotten is that Sinclair has been up to this monkey mischief for quite some time now, even before it commanded its local stations to carry the frothing nonsense of stubbly Trumper Boris Epshteyn. Jay Rosen wrote a dire warning about these people 14 years ago.

She said that on all 62 stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, at different times, on different nights, but close to the election—“like within ten days”—Sinclair was going to interrupt the prime-time programming offered by different networks in different cities where it owns affiliates, and put on the air Stolen Honor, an anti-Kerry documentary—agitprop, as it used to be called—featuring former POWs in Vietnam who, in essence, charge John Kerry with treason for his anti-war efforts. And they were doing all this because….? It didn’t make any sense. You couldn’t complete the because. “That’s an amazing story you have,” I told her. Then she swore me to secrecy until her account ran, which is standard practice. What Sinclair was planning to do didn’t make sense within any known model for operating a company that owns local television stations under U.S. law. Customary practice had always precluded a political intervention of any kind near the finish line of an election. Ultimately behind this custom was not some grand sense of the public interest shared among civic-minded station owners, but a cold realism about electoral politics. Start interfering in the horse race by backing the wrong horse and regulators from the hostile party are likely to make you pay if their guy wins.

As Rosen points out, when Ted Koppel decided to read the names of every member of the servicemembers who had died in Iraq, Sinclair refused to air Nightline on any of the ABC affiliates it owned. So, as we noted, this has been Sinclair’s modus operandi for a very long time.

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Not only is this a cautionary tale about media consolidation—Sinclair is inches away from owning stations in Chicago and Los Angeles—it’s also a cautionary tale about the imbalance between labor and management in a very visible industry. When the mash-up appeared this weekend, anonymous Sinclair employees leapt to the electric Twitter machine to talk about the read-or-die pressure on the employees in the company’s local stations. And, when this happens in the context of an administration dedicated to keeping people stupid enough to believe all its lies, you have reached a critical mass driving the country inexorably toward the result of Mr. Madison’s great warning:

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.”

No “perhaps” about it, Jemmy. Not any more.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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