Our mad, idiot king recently declared war on Tylenol. Nobody really knows why, exactly. There’s only shaky, correlational data to support any link between Tylenol and autism (did you know summertime ice cream consumption leads to an increase in shark attacks?).

And even the backers of those studies say telling pregnant mothers to avoid Tylenol is irresponsible. Mostly, Trump appears to be trying to maintain his flimsy veneer as a populist for the conspiratorially minded MAHA movement. He lies to that gullible segment about cracking down on pharma much like he lied to Matt Stoller types about cracking down on corporate power in general.

That’s certainly not stopping the MAGA propaganda machine from behaving irresponsibly. Sinclair Broadcasting, the local broadcast affiliate that has been censoring comedians that give our mad idiot king a sad, has been really busy helping the administration spread disinformation about Tylenol.

Media Matters notes that while you couldn’t watch Jimmy Kimmel on Sinclair last week, the affiliate was repeatedly platforming a member of an organization who has spread medical misinformation on more than 60 Sinclair stations across 37 states in segments since the Trump announcement:

“[The] guest was Dr. Elizabeth Mumper of the Independent Medical Alliance, formerly known as the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, which pushed a bogus COVID-19 treatments long after it was proved ineffective. Sinclair has previously turned to this group to spread criticism of COVID-19 vaccines and to support Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination as Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary.”

Mumper also took time in the Sinclair segments to also falsely claim that vaccines are harmful to infants, regarding the development of autism, something for which there’s absolutely zero supporting evidence. Keep in mind this is occurring while Trump FCC’s boss claims to be cracking down on affiliates for airing content that poses a threat to local communities (Carr is a shameless liar, if that’s not clear yet).

I hate to beat a dead horse, but media academics have been warning for fifty+ years about the dire problems created by letting media companies (especially local broadcasters) fall into the hands of just a few rich people. Most of the time, the press, public, and even policymakers yawned. Now, every single day, we get ugly, glaring examples why it was a bad idea to ignore their advice.

Authoritarians and corporations in particular love having a monolithic, homogenized media (with all the critical, informed voices marginalized to the fringe), happy to parrot their lies and bullshit. Still, we were endlessly told by corporations (and even “free market Libertarian” groups purportedly super concerned about unchecked state power) that maintaining functional media consolidation limits was a dated relic that “harmed innovation.”

Now the Trump administration is pushing to remove the last remaining media consolidation limits that exist in the U.S., built over generations of bipartisan collaboration. Local right-wing broadcasters Sinclair, Nexstar, and Tegna are all preparing to merge. In addition to massive consolidation among major national networks.

And this isn’t just a “problem for dying traditional media” you can casually dismiss as irrelevant. As we let Twitter, TikTok, and other major social, telecom, and media companies all fall into the hands of a few authoritarian-loyal billionaires, the evidence of harm from mindless consolidation is everywhere you turn. And it’s not remotely subtle.

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