After seven months of an administration that could be charitably described as “uneven” by only the most obsequious of Fox News talking heads, the White House has evidently decided that Roger Ailes’ brainchild won’t quite be sufficient to help disseminate valuable information about the precise ways in which Donald Trump is working to make America great again. On Saturday, token CNN Trump surrogate Kayleigh McEnany abruptly announced her departure from the network and then promptly reappeared on Sunday in a no-budget Ustream-style video clip reading copy that would make North Korean state-run media executives seethe with envy.

Hey everybody, I’m Kayleigh McEnany. Thank you for joining us as we provide you the news of the week from Trump Tower here in New York.

Between a series of PowerPoint-style “wipe” transitions and appropriately somber- and patriotic-sounding strings, McEnany reads out a series of prepared factoids of debatable-at-best veracity. Each 20-second segment wraps with a conclusory, context-free statement—the latest jobs report, McEnany editorializes proudly, proves that “President Trump has clearly steered the economy back in the right direction”—and she signs off by giddily reiterating to viewers that the foregoing presentation was, in fact, the “real news” of the week.

This might have been the weekend’s most entertaining bit of propaganda-related news, but it was not the most meaningful. Soon, Sinclair Broadcast Group, a TV broadcaster that has become famous for requiring the hundreds of local channels it owns to include “must-run” conservative-leaning segments in their programming lineups, will add 42 channels to the 170+ already in its portfolio. Thanks to an assist from the chairman of Donald Trump’s FCC, who revived a decades-old technological loophole that allowed Sinclair to nearly double the congressionally-imposed reach cap of 39 percent, a company that allegedly orders journalists to investigate right-wing media hoaxes and retaliate against its critics will have its stories beamed into 72 percent of U.S. households.

I don’t know if Fox News will ever really turn on President Trump, since providing a signal boost to the Republican Party’s standard-bearer of the moment became the network’s raison d’être long before you ever knew who Sean Hannity was. But Sinclair's expansion and Trump-produced "real news" segments are valuable insurance policies for an administration that has proven comically sensitive to critical press coverage—and that sports an approval rating hovering around 37 percent. Even if Donald Trump burns every last bridge in media, McEnany and friends will ready with an in-house alternative, reassuring die-hard Trump aficionados with unfiltered access to what's really going on in the White House. Meanwhile, Sinclair will slowly but insidiously skew the local news for millions of Americans, most of whom won't even realize that the trusted anchors at their network affiliate are being strong-armed into presenting stories through a decidedly MAGA-colored lens.

These two forms of White House-friendly propaganda are at opposite ends of the subtlety spectrum, but their ability to launch a two-pronged attack on the free press poses a real threat to our democracy. Instead of viewing his inability to earn organic praise as a symptom of being an absurdly incompetent and historically unpopular commander-in-chief, the president has evidently decided that the real problem here is that the coverage of his administration is inherently flawed, and that if he can't convince Americans of his worthiness, controlling the information they use when forming their opinions is the next-best option. Donald Trump desperately wants your respect, but if given the choice between earning it honestly or earning it expediently, he'll always opt for the latter.

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