Raising the minimum wage in the US is a job-killing mistake that will “hurt working-class families and employees who need minimum wage jobs the most”, a top commentator for Sinclair, the rightwing news network, told viewers earlier this year.

His bosses now disagree.

In a surprise move Sinclair, the second-largest television station operator in the US, announced Wednesday it was hiking its minimum wage to $15 an hour, a move that will benefit 15% of its 9,500 workers. It is also a major policy platform being championed at a national level by leftwingers including the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Back in June, Boris Epshteyn, formerly a senior adviser to the Trump campaign and then a Sinclair political commentator, railed about Democrat support for a national wage increase from the current minimum of $7.25 an hour. At the time Epshteyn was reportedly making more than $300,000 a year at Sinclair.

“Here’s the bottom line: free stuff is great! But a federally mandated higher minimum wage is fool’s gold as it will kill jobs and may very well end up crippling our economy,” Epshteyn told viewers.

Earlier this month the network dropped Epshteyn, whose “must run” segments were aired across its 193 stations, along with its other political commentators.

One of Epshteyn’s pieces was criticized by the watchdog Media Matters as “essentially a Trump campaign ad”. The station said the decision had been taken to move away from political commentary in favor of investigative journalism.

Epshteyn’s views on the minimum wage appear to have left with him, too.

“At Sinclair, we recognize that we would be nothing without our hard-working and dedicated employees,” Chris Ripley, Sinclair’s president and chief executive, said in a statement. “This is why we continually work to improve our practices, policies and benefits. With this latest change, we hope to make a meaningful impact on the professional and personal lives of so many valuable members of our team.”