Over the weekend, a montage of local-news anchors went viral. In the video, put out by Deadspin, anchors at stations all owned by the media giant Sinclair Broadcast Group recite word for word a script railing against "false news" and "fake stories," which is slightly different from Donald Trump's attacks on the media but not really.

Sinclair drew sharp criticism across the Internet for the shameless move, with some even calling for a boycott of its stations. But the company got a similarly shameless defense on Monday morning, when Trump himself decided to weigh in:

Trump has good reason to stick up for Sinclair. He has few safe spaces in legit news media, places where he can be relatively sure that his policies or scandals won't be pressed too hard. So far, Sinclair stations have been one of those safe spaces. That's all the more insidious because people expect that kind of contortionist support for Trump when they tune in to something like Fox News, but probably have some assumption of objectivity from their local news. And as Politico reports, last December Jared Kushner was openly bragging about striking a deal between Sinclair and the Trump campaign.

Kushner said the agreement with Sinclair, which owns television stations across the country in many swing states and often packages news for their affiliates to run, gave them more access to Trump and the campaign, according to six people who heard his remarks.