Someone Has Created A Sinclair Blocker Chrome Extension

Sinclair Broadcast Group has been facing growing protests since CNN's Brian Stelter reported company management had mandated the station's local news anchors report on "the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country." There have been widespread calls from critics for some sort of a boycott, although as I noted yesterday the only effective protest is likely to be a boycott of local advertisers who run run spots during local news broadcasts.

But if you're looking for a slightly more goofball way of registering your unhappiness with Sinclair Broadcasting, someone has created a Google Chrome extension which will prevent you from visiting the web site of any television station owned by Sinclair. Instead, you're re-directed to the Free Press web site which is promoting their campaign to stop the Sinclair Broadcast Group takeover of the television stations owned by Tribune Broadcasting.

To be clear, this extension is not a real solution for anyone looking to punish Sinclair-owned television stations, since simply diverting your browser to the Free Press web site doesn't help you find the information you were presumably looking for when you visited the Sinclair-owned web site in the first place. Still, it's a fun distraction.

Update: I received an update from Nick Davis, the man behind the Stop Sinclair extension. Here's a bit of background about Nick and why he created the extension:

In 2004, shortly before the Bush/Kerry election, Sinclair Broadcast Group (which then had around 60 stations) chose to air a documentary called Stolen Honor in an attempt to sway voters away from Kerry. They forced all stations to air the program. 

In response we launched a successful advertiser boycott against the local and national Sinclair advertisers. I setup a database and many people around the country contributed to the list of advertisers. The boycott was successful and caused other interested parties to file a shareholder lawsuit against Sinclair. This was one of the first known instances of coordination by blogs and other emerging media and was written about extensively:

https://repository.law.umich.edu/mttlr/vol12/iss1/1/

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300125771/wealth-networks

So here we find ourselves again. Sinclair is now a beast three times the size it was in 2014, and possibly even larger soon if the proposed merger goes through. 

I've been out of activism for a decade, but after seeing the long list of affiliates, I felt a quick and easy stopgap would be an extension that redirects users away from their local Sinclair stations. Many cities have multiple stations and it can be confusing to remember which stations are owned by Sinclair. 

We can take this Goliath down with the same tactics we used in 2004. But we need a new database and a ton of (trusted) people to log advertisers on roughly 175 local stations, especially during the local news programs. These ads are the bread and butter revenue for local stations and Sinclair's stock price will reflect those efforts.