Propaganda used to be a dirty word in this country. Long associated with authoritarian regimes in countries like Russia and China, propaganda as it has been understood over the decades meant centralized control over the way a nation’s citizens access the news — not just the news about the country they live in, but about that country’s place in the world.

When Vladimir Putin took over in Russia a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the first things he did was to begin his gradual seizure of control over the Russian media. Ownership of newspapers and broadcasting stations, both television and radio, had only recently been privatized, and Putin engineered a process whereby one news outlet after another was sold to friendly oligarchs. Eventually, virtually all formerly independent news outlets were returned to de facto state control as Putin tightened his grip on power.

In Hungary, right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has sought to follow the Putin model, closing unfriendly news outlets for violating various newly-passed laws and turning them over to the control of oligarchs friendly to his regime. Right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson and, through him, broadcast companies like Fox News have approvingly noted Orbán’s control over how people in Hungary get their news. When Carlson was the biggest prime-time host on Fox News, he even broadcast his show from Budapest for a week, promoting Orbán and the “illiberal democracy” he brought to his country.

In this country, the takeover of broadcast and print news has progressed more slowly, but arguably just as surely. Sinclair Broadcast Group, owned by the arch-conservative Smith family of Baltimore, went on a buying spree that began back in the 1980s and ‘90s, taking control of local television stations around the country. Sinclair even came up with a way of getting around FCC rules that barred ownership of two competing stations in one market throughj so-called local marketing agreements, under which Sinclair could operate a second station in a given market by selling it to a corporation that would eventually come under Sinclair’s control if and when FCC rules are relaxed. Next came so-called shared services agreements, which allowed Sinclair to control a third station in Columbus, Ohio, where Sinclair already operated two stations.

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Then Sinclair doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on its strategy to take over local stations, beginning another buying spree, this time buying multiple stations from media outfits like Cox Communications and Allbritton........

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