You can’t plan coincidences like this, but on the day activists delivered more than 700,000 petition signatures to the Federal Communications Commission demanding they stop the expansion of Sinclair Broadcasting, a news story reported by National Public Radio reveals that Russians intentionally exploited local news in part of their influence campaign to destabilize our democracy and impact the 2016 election.

According to the Pew Center, 82 percent of Americans place “some” or “a lot” of trust in the information they obtain from local news. Relying on national news organizations for information ranks six points less and social media comes in at only 34 percent.

So it’s no wonder Russian intelligence operatives, whose mission was to destabilize our democracy by inflaming division, targeted local news.

What is a question, is why the Federal Communications Commission, would support Sinclair Broadcasting’s use the same tactics of misinformation, forced coverage of news stories from the Trump White House, or that are blatantly racist, or that fit a corporate agenda. The forced reading of the corporation’s content as if it comes from your local station, dictated by corporate ideology in a distant central office far from the communities where the broadcast is seen by viewers as “local news” is like Russian or old-school Soviet-style propaganda.

The FCC is supposed to be the people’s agency to make sure the public’s airwaves are used appropriately, to protect consumers and prevent the concentration of media into too few hands, and resolve issues between consumers and the Big Telecom companies. Companies, like Sinclair, are licensed to use the public’s communications spectrum to serve the public, providing entertainment, news, education, and important safety information. Why would the FCC want to force Americans to be subjected to any one political perspective? Why would the FCC allow Sinclair to lie making it seem like their ideological broadcasts are actually “local news?”

But the FCC has been transformed from a more consumer-orientation to corporate-shills, approving mergers and concentrating even the power of local news into too few hands far the communities they serve. Watch this short video and learn more about how to help stop Sinclair Broadcasting.

https://www.facebook.com/freepress/videos/10156295387585610/