what amounted to an infomercial, was the station responding to a “request” from higher-ups, or were they just pandering to their top executive’s financial interests? Who can say? Neither Sinclair nor Fox 45 have responded to questions about whether the corporate office forced the segment on the station.

And yet the timing is worth noting. The Curio segment aired only a week after CNN broke a big story about Sinclair forcing its putatively local anchors to read identical scripts decrying “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country.” That story of the scripted corporate hacks went viral a couple of weeks later when Deadspin put together a video of dozens of anchors obediently parroting the same Trumpian line sent to them by the corporate office.

So becausehis brothers made two major innovations: instead of branding their company as a single unified network, like Fox or NBC, they would focus on local stations that ran other networks’ programming alongside Sinclair-skewed newscasts; they now own 191 local broadcast stations that are affiliated with different networks—a Fox station in Baltimore; ABC in Tulsa; NBC in Toledo; CBS in Spokane, etc. And because federal regulations in their early building days prohibited them from owning more than one station in a single market, they started another company in 1991 called Glencairn, owned by their mother.

In 2002, Smith used WBFF’s investigative efforts to help elect Republican Robert Ehrlich governor in Maryland, by running as many as five segments a week against his opponent Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. “All of our resources