Sinclair’s Weekly Worst: The Case for “Good Colonialism”

Every week Allied Progress will share a selection of Sinclair Broadcast Group’s “Must Runs” segments. These are biased segments that Sinclair’s headquarters famously mandates that all of their 191 stations run. If Sinclair’s merger with Tribune is approved, a total of 233 stations – reaching 72 percent of American households – will be forced to air these segments every week.

Journalists at Sinclair object to their airing. Experts call them propaganda. Allied Progress watches them…so you don’t need to. 

This week’s Sinclair Low-Lights…

FEATURED LOW-LIGHT: On Thursday, Mark Hyman pondered, “Can a case be made there is good colonialism?” According to Hyman: “It’s topics like these that inspire rigorous academic debate.” Hyman dedicated his segment to defending Portland professor Bruce Gilley, who has faced immense and justified push back for his recently published essay, “The Case for Colonialism.” The essay caused mass resignations at the journal it was published in, and criticism for faulty data and racist logic, but Hyman blames in on “political correctness run amuck.”

The essay’s abstract reads: “For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is high time to question this orthodoxy.” Ignoring the genocide and enslavement colonialism caused across the world, Hyman concludes that “not debating it may be the biggest tragedy of all.”

RUNNER-UP: On Monday, Boris Epshteyn got meta by talking about how unfair he’s been treated for his propaganda segments on Sinclair. He decries “the lack of tolerance to opposing viewpoints” and says, “some people want to silence my voice and keep me off TV simply because I worked on political campaigns and for this current administration.” By Boris’s logic, if George Stephanopoulos, Chris Matthews, Jake Tapper and Chuck Todd can be on TV, then it’s fine to force local news station across the country to run his segments nine times a week. His bottom line, that he aims to offer “educated, thoughtful analysis” may just be one of his biggest and boldest lies to date.

On Wednesday, Boris continued to be very upset, this time by Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker for using “very colorful language to attack the President of the United States personally.” Boris then boasts about the margins by which Trump won Arizona and Tennessee, to defend the administration by claiming “these senators are no longer representing what their constituents want.”