John Oliver has spent much of 2017 exploring little crevasses of despair in Trump’s America, but on Sunday night, the Last Week Tonight host turned his attention to a seemingly apolitical institution: local news. As Oliver tells it, however, the days of trusting your citywide station for in-depth crime and weather reports and little else may soon be numbered. This is because of Sinclair Broadcast Group, the “most influential media company you’ve never heard of,†and their verging-on-successful effort to essentially co-opt the local news market for a specific kind of conservative agenda (i.e., the kind that uses “Muslim†and “terrorist†interchangeably). Oliver, ever the realist, could only leave viewers with a fairly bleak warning: “Good luck with that shit.â€
