In a totally neutral and principled appeal to the Trump Regime FCC for why his company should be allowed to buy up smaller rival TEGNA and thus acquire significantly more local affiliate stations than regulations currently allow for, Nexstar CEO Perry Sook wrote: “To be clear, in an age of disinformation and political agendas, we are the anti-fake news. Our news is delivered by trusted, familiar voices – journalists who live in the community – not a chatbot or social media influencers.”

“And yet, we are prohibited from broadcasting trusted local news and programming to hundreds of communities across the country because of antiquated regulatory constraints. In an era where political discourse has turned increasingly polarized and violent, our democracy requires that Americans have easy access to reliable fact-based journalism and community forums to debate the issues of the day safely and respectfully. Nexstar’s acquisition of TEGNA will provide us with the scale necessary for local journalism to thrive amidst a media landscape that is dominated by Big Tech and the legacy media companies, enabling us to continue not only investing in high-quality journalism and local news, but in serving our local communities in the best possible way,” Sook continued, as though such pablum was necessary after he had led with that “anti-fake news” shit.

That was all that shitbag Brendan Carr and his fat orange boss needed to hear from him.