A Kentucky Democrat running for Congress is pulling her campaign advertising from a television station owned by Sinclair Broadcasting Group, a conservative media company that has been under fire for mandating anchors across the country warn their viewers about “fake news.”
Amy McGrath, a retired Marine who is running in Kentucky’s 6th District for the Democratic nomination to take on GOP Rep. Andy Barr, announced Monday that her campaign would no longer advertise on WDKY-TV in light of the revelations. Sinclair-owned WDKY is based in Lexington, a dominant television market in the district.
{mosads}”Sinclair’s corporate-mandated ‘must-read’ right-wing script on its nearly 200 television stations about ‘fake news’ is itself an extreme danger to our Democracy and eerily mimics the propaganda efforts that authoritarian regimes often use to control the media in their own country,” she said in a statement.
“The nearly 20,000 grassroots donors who have contributed to my campaign should have the expectation that their financial support will never be used to enrich these chilling right-wing efforts to stifle the critical role of local journalism to advance their narrow ideological and political agenda.”
McGrath went on to call on Democratic candidates to follow suit and mount a “boycott” to support the freedom of the press. McGrath is running against Lexington Mayor Jim Gray in the Democratic primary.
Sinclair Broadcasting has been at the center of controversy in recent days, after an internet video showing dozens of channels reading the same mandated language about “fake news” went viral.
The message read by Sinclair anchors criticizes the rise of “biased and fake news,” while adding that “national media outlets are publishing these same fake stories without checking facts first.”
Sinclair has faced criticism for what some see as open support of President Trump. Former Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn is a political commentator for the company, and reports say that many of his pro-Trump segments are distributed to local networks as “must-runs.” The network was also accused of pro-Trump bias during the presidential campaign.
Trump himself waded into the controversy on Monday, tweeting that Sinclair is not biased but is instead “far superior to CNN” as well as NBC News.