As Sinclair prepares to expand its stable of local TV stations with a proposed acquisition of Tribune Media – which would add 42 stations to Sinclair's 173 – advocacy groups have shown concern about the size and reach the combined company would have.

The Sinclair group, which owns 173 television stations, is in the process of acquiring 42 more, and the New York Times doesn't like that. It has run a hit piece claiming that Sinclair's local stations produce politically biased news – conservative news, that is – therefore making Sinclair unfit to own more of them.

What "advocacy groups" would those be? Have those advocacy groups also shown concern about liberal bias at the top American newspapers and national news broadcasts? Probably not.

Critics of the deal also cite Sinclair's willingness to use its stations to advance a mostly right-leaning agenda.

So there is only one kind of bias that concerns the NYT: conservative bias.

That is what has happened in Seattle, a progressive city where Sinclair owns the KOMO broadcast station. In interviews over the past several days, eight current and former KOMO employees described a newsroom where some have chafed at Sinclair's programming directives, especially the must-runs, which they view as too politically tilted and occasionally of poor quality. They also cited features like a daily poll, which they believe sometimes asks leading questions.

Let us shed some tears for liberal journalists at KOMO who don't like their new management. By the way, has the Times ever been guilty of using polls to ask leading questions?

KOMO journalists were surprised in January when, at a morning planning meeting, they received what they considered an unusual request. The station's news director, who normally avoided overtly political stories, instructed his staff to look into an online ad that seemed to be recruiting paid protesters for President Trump's inauguration.

Do you believe that before Sinclair bought KOMO, KOMO "normally avoided overly political stories" or subsisted on a steady diet of race, sex, class, and sexual orientation stories? And would KOMO journalists have instead resisted a "political" story of how the Russians were allegedly working to elect Trump? Probably not.

If it acquires Tribune, Sinclair would gain stations in the nation's three largest markets – New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Not only are cities like those more liberal, but the journalists who work there tend to be more experienced – and resistant to what they might see as ideologically slanted content.

Do you think journalists in New York and Los Angeles are resistant to "ideologically slanted content"?

"Our view is that news isn't liberal or conservative," said Mr. Twedell, the union representative who is in negotiations with Sinclair management.

Do you think a union representative truly believes that news isn't liberal or conservative?

The entire article is laughable because it is produced by a far-left outlet, the New York Times, which holds itself out as unbiased and then accuses Sinclair of bias itself. It is part of a subtle campaign to turn public opinion (and perhaps antitrust regulators?) against Sinclair's purchase of additional stations.

This is why the NYT was threatened by Citizens United. The Times decried the vast expenditure of corporate funds on influencing election results, when the Times itself is a corporation dedicated to the very same thing and simply wants to continue to do so unhindered by conservative competition. Its effort to torpedo the Sinclair purchase is part of the same campaign, to convince readers that only the Times and other like-minded media outlets can be trusted to dispense the news.

Ed Straker is the senior writer at NewsMachete.com.