After a video of numerous anchors repeating right-wing talking points in unison went viral, the Sinclair Broadcasting Group has become a lightning rod of liberal ire over the past week. “Watch this video” went the chorus of the concerned, raising serious questions concerning the independence of local news stations and journalists. Jimmy Kimmel, whose late-night show is broadcast on numerous Sinclair owned local ABC stations from Washington DC to Seattle Washington, said “this is extremely dangerous to our democracy,” showing that the ex-”Man Show” host is willing to at least nibble on the hand that feeds him.

The Sinclair Group, a conglomeration of media properties founded in 1971 by Julian Sinclair Smith that currently owns stations with access to one-third of US households, has a history of producing scummy right-wing propaganda. In 2004, Sinclair aired a comically refutable, but effective, documentary called Stolen Honor, an outwardly hostile film concerning the military service and later anti-war activism of that year’s Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry. The film was independently available for purchase online, but that didn’t stop the Sinclair group, which at that time owned 62 stations across the country, from having every Sinclair station from airing the documentary in full commercial free.

Currently the Sinclair Group is attempting to buy the Tribune company, another massive media conglomerate, which would give Sinclair access to over 70 percent of households through free broadcast television news. Thankfully, this takeover has hit a bit of a snag, with antitrust officials from the Justice Department investigating the FCC’s relationship with the company, most notably that of Ajit Pai, Trump’s chosen FCC chair and figurehead of the forces that crushed Obama era net neutrality rulings. You may know Pai from his notoriously terrible YouTube video where he plays with a fidget spinner and dresses up like Santa “for the lulz,” a video that estimates the average adult intelligence to be somewhere between a pre-verbal toddler and a spider monkey. However, like in many other examples over the past 30 years of corporate consolidation, Sinclair has the resources, patience, and political connections to weather the storm.

In our current political moment, it can be very easy to find a villain and singularize its purpose and importance. This has undoubtedly happened in the minds of elite liberal commentariot and plebeian activists organized around opposition to all things Trump, with political pressure groups like Indivisible calling out the more obvious propagandistic segments handed down to local news anchors from Sinclair’s corporate headquarters. While this is an admirable and effective tool for raising awareness, we cannot miss the forest for the trees, or in the classic case of local news, the highway for the car chase. We cannot become nostalgic for a time when local news was “better”.

Local news has been spreading oligarchic propaganda for generations now, but, like much of right-wing politics in 2018, they have dropped the subtext and are saying the quiet part loud. While this is an obvious degradation of civility and norms, the product of the local news model has been a force of political reaction for some time now. I would not be the first to make this point, as this point is one of the climactic moments of Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” over 15 years ago now, but local news has become a professionalized fear machine. Be afraid of your neighbors, local news says. Always trust the cops, especially the ones local news will bring on to defend any action taken by law enforcement. Much of local news has been an organizational tool of authoritarianism guised as important, neutral, and unquestionable as gravity.

This is not to mention the innumerable local newscasts chock-a-block with “feel good” stories of workers prostrating themselves and their dignity to their bosses. These messages will inadvertently highlight the extreme hardship of the proletarian underclass, but instead of turning it into a chance to examine the inequality and struggle that working people face on a daily basis, it becomes a narrative of how they “triumphed over their circumstances” by just working even harder. Think of stories like how a Burger King employee broke his leg and had to continue to work because he lived in crushing poverty or the perennial story of the single parent who takes insanely long bus trips or walks 10 plus miles just to get to their minimum wage job. Instead of turning these broadcasts into a chance to analyze the inefficiency and brutality of the 21st century economy and offer solutions to these workers extreme hardship, the message is clear: “if they can do it, why can’t you?” Who benefits from that narrative except the bosses?

Sinclair is undoubtedly a force of extreme right-wing politics that will seep into the minds of the most normie among us. The brazenness of Sinclair management has made their goal quite clear. However, local news has been a dispensary of paranoid provincialism for generations at this point. Much like the Republican party’s relationship to Donald Trump, local news has been grooming audiences for these kinds of messages for years now, reinforcing prejudices and ideological inclinations towards reactionary politics for years. This game of fear set the stage for the more overtly right-wing politics of a conglomerate like Sinclair.

We cannot hold out for elites and institutions to save us from these trends. The rise Sinclair’s prominence highlights the undeniable reality that extreme wealth inequality leads to. Sinclair is not an aberration in the system of American oligarchy, but rather the logical conclusion to years of authoritarian pandering to some of humanity’s worst traits all in the name of capital. If we wish to take back our airwaves, we must not be nostalgic for a slightly better history, but be bold in pushing ideas that will not just be vaguely popular, but powerful and substantial as we challenge some of the wealthiest media organizations in human history.