Craig Aaron: Get ready for pro-Trump TV 24/7 in your city

Donald Trump’s favorite local TV chain is about to get a lot bigger thanks to — wait for it — Donald Trump.

Trump’s Federal Communications Commission is paving the way for Sinclair Broadcast Group — already the nation’s largest TV conglomerate — to take over Tribune, which owns 42 stations in many of the country’s big cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Denver.

You may not have heard of Sinclair. But if you watch your local news, there’s a good chance you’re already watching a Sinclair-owned station.

Sinclair already owns 173 stations, which are local affiliates in different cities for national networks like ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC. If this merger goes through, Sinclair will own a whopping 215 stations.

No company has ever had that degree of control over local TV news, which is still the top news source for a majority of Americans.

This deal would have been unthinkable in any other administration. But Trump’s FCC is actually rewriting the rules to make it happen — and to give one of the administration’s loudest media boosters an even bigger megaphone.

Sinclair is no ordinary company: It’s notorious for slipping right-wing views and Republican talking points into its newscasts. It overrides the objections of local journalists and requires its stations to run conservative commentaries and slanted stories every day.

In March, for example, Sinclair ordered its local stations to air a Trump-friendly commentary that accused the national media of publishing “fake news.”

This behavior is nothing new for Sinclair: This is the same company that aired the distorted Swift Boat movie that helped sink John Kerry during the 2004 presidential election. Sinclair also refused to fire commentator Armstrong Williams after the FCC fined the company in 2007 for airing government propaganda and failing to disclose his conflicts of interest.

Instead, Sinclair put Williams in charge of one of its front companies.

And Sinclair went all out for Trump in 2016. Jared Kushner, the president’s adviser and son-in-law, has bragged about a special deal he struck with Sinclair to get Trump uninterrupted favorable coverage. The company has been hiring Trump-campaign spokespeople as analysts ever since.

Now Sinclair’s getting its payback.

If this deal goes through, the company’s cookie-cutter, Trump-boosting content could reach more than 70 percent of the U.S. population. But to pull off its takeover of Tribune, Sinclair needs the FCC to change the rules,

So that’s exactly what FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is doing: As one of his first acts, he changed how the agency calculates station reach so Sinclair could dodge the ownership limits. In fact, the FCC is now pretending that Sinclair would reach just 44 percent of the national audience — even though the company is already boasting to investors that it will actually reach a much greater share.

Sinclair would still need to sell off a couple of stations to get under the national cap. So company lobbyists are pushing to get rid of any limits whatsoever.

The FCC’s ownership rules were designed to ensure a diversity of local voices and opinions — ut women and people of color own very few TV stations. Instead of creating olicies hat romot equity and opportunity, the Trump FCC would rather super-size Sinclair.

For years, Sinclair has been using every trick in the book to evade and undermine the rules. Now the game has changed: Instead of appointing a referee to call corporate fouls, Trump gave the whistle to Chairman Pai, a full-throated cheerleader for runaway consolidation.

If you don’t like this rigged game, now is the time to make your voice heard.

Craig Aaron is the president and CEO of Free Press. 

David Warsh: A very big building and almost two decades of Trump-Russia ties

Trump World Tower.

Having spent the last six months preparing a history of Harvard University’s mission to Moscow in the 1990s and the scandal that ensued (to appear sometime this summer), I have often been reminded of William Faulkner’s line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  This is as true of the Trump-Russia story as it is of the larger and more intricate realm of U.S.-Russia relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Holman JenkinsJr., the least predictable columnist at The Wall Street Journal, noted last week that Watergate analogies in the Trump Russia controversy are beside the point.  What is wanted, he wrote, is a Pentagon Papers-style history of U.S. policy, “an emptying out of the files” necessary to illuminate the “awkward, contradictory and humiliating straddles” of Western governments over the last 25years.

Alas, we are unlikely to get that kind of retrospective from WikiLeaks. What is required instead is a great deal of shoe-leather reporting. An especially good example was to be found 10 days ago in “The Rich Refugees Who Saved Trump,’’ by Caleb Melby and Keri Geiger, with Michael Smith, Alexander Sazenov and Polly Mosendz, writing in Bloomberg Businessweek (BBw).

When construction 0f Trump World Tower, at 845 United Nations Plaza, in midtown Manhattan was begin two decades ago as the tallest residential building in the country (90 stories), its most expensive floors attracted rich people getting their money out of what had been the Soviet Union.

Trump needed the big spenders. He was renegotiating $1.8 billion in junk bonds for his Atlantic City resorts, and the tower was built on a mountain of debt owed to German banks.

The story is the most plausible account I’ve yet seen of what Trump’s oldest son, Donald Jr., may have meant when he said, in 2008, “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”  In the earlier case reported by BBw, the deluge occurred at a most propitious time, in the late 1990s, when Trump’s business was stretched thin and under stress.

Trump broke ground on the building in October 1998, across the street from the United Nations headquarters. After several years of boisterous churn and at long last some growth, the Russian economy was in crisis. The ruble had collapsed in August; the government had defaulted on its domestic debt. Savvy Russians had scrambled to get their money out of the country. From the article:

“Real Estate provides a safe haven for overseas investors. It has few reporting requirements and is a preferred way to move cash of questionable provenance. Amid the turmoil, buyers found a dearth of available projects.  Trump World Tower, opened in 2001, became a prominent depository of Russian money.

Others who bought units in the building, with its 72 constructed floors and 90 stories listed on its elevator panels, included New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter, Bill Gates, Harrison Ford, Sophia Loren, and Kellyanne Conway and her husband, according to Wikipedia. BBw reported:

“The very top floors remained unsold for years but a third of the units sold on floors 76 through 83 by 2004 involved people or limited liability corporations connected to Russia and neighboring states, a Bloomberg investigation shows.  The reporting involved more than two dozen interviews and a review of hundreds of public records in New York.’’

Trump scholars gradually will determine how material was the sales boost in the complicated ups-and-downs of Trump’s financial position in those days. For an explication of some of the favors owed, which in one case went back to 1976, see the current article.  This much is indelibly clear: the president has seen Russia as a prime source of revenue, if not investment, for 20 years. Again, BBw:

“Simultaneous with when the tower was going up, developer Gil Dezer and his father, Michael, were building a Trump-backed condo project in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla. “Russians love the Trump brand,” [Dezer] says, adding that Russians and Russian Americans bought some 200 of the 2,000 units in Trump buildings he built.  They flooded into Trump projects from 2001 to 2007, helping Trump weather the real estate collapse, he says.’’

A similar situation, this one involving a troubled midtown Manhattan building owned by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and a billionaire Chinese would-be investor, was covered in some detail earlier this month by The New York Times and the WSJ. The next step is to follow Bloomberg’s team in tracing Trump’s dealings with Russians back in time.

My hunch is that  Jenkins is right, that the 2016 campaign-collusion story will turn out to be a dead end. Much more interesting is the saga of the formation of Trump’s views of Russia over the last 25 years.

David Warsh is a veteran reporter and columnist, mostly in economic matters, and an economic historian. He’s also the proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.

David Warsh: The accidental president

Cast your mind back a couple of years ago, to the six weeks when the presidential campaign of 2016 was gearing up.  Lukewarm Jeb Bush decided at Thanksgiving with his family in 2014 to throw his hat in the ring. Suddenly in January Mitt Romney jumped into the race – for all of three weeks. What I’ve heard since from various insiders is that his children were reluctant and his fundraisers told him no. Had his backers pushed ahead, there’s a good chance that Romney would be president-elect today.

The 2016 election was a fluke, the result of a desire on the part of the leaders of both parties to refight the election of 1992, when Bill Clinton surprised George H. W. Bush and H Ross Perot got 19 percent of the popular vote (but no votes in the Electoral College). 

 The shock to blue-collar workers then was trade with Mexico and Japan; in the last 10 years, it was China. Bush faded early. Clinton carried 24 years’ worth of baggage.  So splintered was the Republican Party that 17 candidates declared. This time the outsider slipped in – a 70-year-old billionaire willing and able to flout every convention.

Staffing up is now drawing most of the attention, but getting to know Trump’s closest advisers, Jared Kushner and Stephen Bannon is even more fundamental. More than a year ago, Bannon was the subject of a prescient article by Joshua Green in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. It revealed, among other things, that Bannon was the force behind Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Clinton Rich (HarperCollins, 2015).

That plainly partisan account, by Peter Schweizer, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, nevertheless succeeded in calling widespread attention to the novel institution that was the Clinton Foundation. Aroused by the book, rogue FBI agents, past and present, forced Director James Comey to issue his controversial letters to congressional committee chairmen shortly before the election. (His dilemma was widely misunderstood.)

Similarly, it is pretty widely recognized by now that it was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and close counselor, who ran off from the transition team New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. There was Bridgegate, of course. Less noticed was the fact that as U.S. attorney for New Jersey 10 years before, eager to rise in Republican ranks, Christie prosecuted Kushner’s father, a real estate developer and prominent Democrat, for income-tax evasion.  

Kushner remained fiercely loyal to his father throughout, flying down Sundays to Alabama for more than a year to visit his father in federal prison. Still less well known is the nature of the prosecution.  Here’s the way that Gary Silverman described it in the Financial Times:

“Not only had the elder Kushner admitted to filing false tax reports, he also acknowledged hiring a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband so the encounter could be filmed by private detectives in his employ. The tape was then sent to his brother-in-law and sister’s home in an ill-fated attempt to stop them from helping prosecutors.’’

So much for meeting the top guys inside the Trump White House.  Over the next few weeks, there will be a steady stream of news about nominations and appointments.  After Jan.  20, the next four years will be a constant tussle between Trump and the “elite’’ he despises — the press and, of course, mainstream economists of both parties in particular. Martin Feldstein and Lawrence Summers have already weighed in. Expect appointments to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors to give him the most trouble.   After that come, in no particular order, foreign relations, national defense, domestic policing, health care, Social Security, tax reform, global warming and trade.

Only slightly less interesting is the contest for leadership of the Democratic Party. Tim Ryan, 43, of Ohio, announced he would challenge Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, 76, of California, for the top Democratic leadership spot in the House. The eight-term congressman was at first judged to be a longshot – Pelosi has led Congressional Democrats for nearly fourteen years, longer than former House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. 

 But Ryan has succeeded in delaying a vote.  In fact the choice would seem to be a no-brainer. The Democrats have lost 60 seats from the majority they held in 2009.  As WBUR broadcaster Jack Beatty observed, the average home price in Ryan’s heavily Democratic district, which includes Akron and Youngstown, is around $50,000; in the San Francisco district that Pelosi represents, it’s $1.1 million. Pelosi’s net worth is more than $100 million; Ryan’s is around $200,000   A vote is scheduled for Nov. 30.

Donald J. Trump is certainly smart enough to be president, but in one respect he is especially ill-equipped for the job’s most important requirement – that of narrator-in-chief.  It always seemed likely to me that had Hillary Clinton been elected, she would serve only one term.  My guess is the same of Trump. Should he choose not to run, the GOP has Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Ben Sasse, Tom Cotton, and, yes, Ted Cruz.  Competitive Democratic candidates have yet to emerge. Sooner or later, calm opposition to the accidental president can be expected to put the Democrats back in the White House. The redistricting game takes longer.

David Warsh,  a veteran financial journalist and economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville, Mass.-based economic principals.com, where this first ran.