JENNIFER GLASSE (HOST): When you turn on your TV, you think you're watching your local TV station, and it's ABC 4 or CBS 7 or whatever it is, you think you're watching the network. And yet in a number of cases -- more than 170 cases -- you're watching Sinclair. Is that transparent to the viewer? You've been covering Sinclair for a while. Do they let people know that it's them?

PAMELA VOGEL (MEDIA MATTERS RESEARCH FELLOW): No. I think that's kind of the most insidious part, is that exploitation of trust. As you mentioned at the top, people have more trust in their local broadcast news than almost any other source. So when they are watching TV at night, and they look for the local station, they're seeing, like you said, ABC 6. They're not seeing a Sinclair logo on the screen anywhere. And so I think it's normal to assume that the anchor is the one responsible for the content of the broadcast. And while that's often the case -- and I think the local journalists that are employed by Sinclair are not -- I think they're in a very hard situation as Kirk was just discussing -- it really does -- I think it gets people riled up. And that's why we're seeing so much public interest now with this Deadspin video.

GLASSE: And tell me why you think this video has caused such interest, outrage, such a buzz really on the internet.

VOGEL: I think there's two things. One is that element of exploiting trust and people just being totally unaware. A lot of people had never even heard the word “Sinclair” until recently. And now they're sort of awakened to the idea that, “Hey, I don't actually know who's controlling what's coming out of my newscast every night.” Especially with that trust in local anchors, you are used to this person who's probably part of your community who's telling you things like what's going on at the latest schoolboard meeting and suddenly you are now aware that this is actually script that's being read across the country. This is not something that's relevant to you, a viewer in Illinois, for example. 

And I think the second thing is, honestly, it's the impropriety level of what's happening with Sinclair. Once you get tuned into what that name means and a little bit more about the company, it just feels a little dirty. And the context of the actual script that we just heard, it sounds an awful lot like an attack on the press. They keep it sort of on purpose very vague and refer to some media and national media, mainstream media figures. That's sort of the implication, but reading between the lines, some of the words that they're using in that script sound awfully familiar. They can sound a little bit like a Trump tweet. For example, the president has tweeted about Sinclair specifically twice in the last few days.

Previously:

Here are 66 local news stations airing Sinclair’s brainwashing anti-media promo 

On Sirius XM's Steele & Ungar, Media Matters' Pam Vogel explains the danger of Sinclair's “must run” segments

Here are the “manipulative” ads Sinclair forced local anchors to read, now airing across the country