Don't worry, Ajit Pai says his FCC is not biased in favor of Sinclair Broadcasting
Whew, here’s some good news for a change! According to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, the FCC is definitely not biased in favor of super-conservative media monster Sinclair Broadcasting—the ring-wing blob that is looking to subsume every local news outlet in the country so it can turn them into pro-Trump propaganda machines. That comes from the FCC’s own inspector general, so you know it can be trusted, even though the organization has not released the inspector general’s full findings and the only thing we have to go off of is some hand-picked excerpts and a statement from Pai. But hey, we’ve got no reason not to trust Pai, even though he’s the bastard who killed net neutrality, lied about a “cyber attack” that conveniently happened just after John Oliver told his HBO viewers to leave pro-net neutrality comments on an FCC site, and rebuilt the FCC itself into an organization designed to line the pockets of telecom giants.
This silly misunderstanding has been building since last year, when Pai’s FCC changed media ownership rules to allow for one single company to control every media outlet in a given area even without establishing a local “main studio.” This came after Pai reportedly met with Sinclair—has called for these exact changes—multiple times, making it look a whole lot like Sinclair was pulling the FCC’s strings. In February, after Sinclair announced its plan to merge with Tribune Media to create the largest TV broadcasting company in the country, the FCC’s “top internal watchdog” launched an investigation into whether or not Pai really was operating just to benefit Sinclair. This at least derailed the Tribune merger, because apparently there’s no point in trying to destroy the country if the people who are already destroying the country are going to be little brats about it.
In the end, though, everything is working out just fine. Pai says that the inspector general says there was “no evidence, nor even the suggestion, of impropriety, unscrupulous behavior, favoritism, towards Sinclair, or lack of impartiality related to the proposed Sinclair-Tribune Merger,” and even if that seems like an odd phrasing and a whole lot of commas, surely there’s no reason to doubt that it’s true. After all, Pai made a big show of saying he wasn’t sure if the merger was a good idea, which he would never say if he were a Sinclair stooge, right?