Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the largest owner of local television stations in America, is still not a household name like, for example, Fox News. Yet it may be the truest heir to former Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes’s original vision of conservative news programming. Long before cable news, Ailes — who died in 2017 — had been dreaming up ways to inject local news programs with a conservative spin.

Sinclair will have the ability to reach, and influence, far more Americans than Fox News could ever hope to writes USSC honorary associate Dr Nicole Hemmer for NBC News.