By EVAN SIEGEL

Sinclair Broadcast Group is becoming one of the most influential organizations in the country. The public broadcast firm has slowly begun to monopolize television markets across the country with the hopes of putting their thumb on the scale and skewing the content in a certain way. The broadcasting firm was founded in 1971, but in recent years has exploded in value and is drastically changing the local news industry.

The company has a total operating revenue value of a whopping $2.73 billion, making it one of the biggest digital media corporations in the world. The organization has slowly bought station after station all across the United States and, after some legal battle with Channel 7 in South Florida, their brand is becoming more and more known.

Recently, Sinclair Broadcast Group acquired Turner Media and its 42 television stations. Sinclair is known for forcing their anchors on television stations to air “must-runs,” which are scripted messages that lean noticeably conservative. Each station that Sinclair owned in 2018 ran a combined 92,000 must-runs, all of which used a familiar phrase.

“Unfortunately some members of the media use their own personal bias to promote their political agenda.” Over 100 stations across the country was forced into running a passage that started with that exact statement in 2018, but after Sinclair failed to purchase Fox’s Channel 7 in Miami, the company is beginning to see slow-downs in acquiring other news stations.

The firm also airs attack ads in commercial breaks, some as long as 20 minutes, detailing various controversies that have existed on the left as far back as the days of the Civil War. Sinclair recently has been rumored to be interested in buying out the gargantuan contract of Sean Hannity, Fox News’s evening news megastar.