Sinclair Broadcast: The Puppetmasters

By Paul Schmelzer, AlterNet. Posted February 17, 2005.

On the surface, nothing in the April 17, 2001 evening news broadcast on Baltimore’s WBFF-TV was atypical. A reporter from the Fox affiliate covered efforts by environmental groups to clean up the North Branch of the Potomac River in western Maryland. It featured visuals of factory crud in the river, interviews with canoeing enthusiasts, and a shot of the Westvaco Paper Mill, the apparent cause of the river's contamination.

But there was one oddity: The station devoted its resources — use of the corporate helicopter, a news crew and valuable air time — to a story 160 miles from its headquarters. So far away, in fact, that locals can't even tune into the broadcast. So far away that there's another major national market, Washington DC, in between.

So why did this particular station reach beyond its service area to report on an apparent act of philanthropy? Because this Fox affiliate is owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc., where such efforts are green-lighted when the station's corporate owners are personally, financially, or politically affected by the news, according to current and former staffers who spoke to AlterNet only on condition of anonymity.

One such staffer says that Sinclair Vice President J. Duncan Smith asked Craig Demchak to take on the story. "Duncan comes in and says: 'Craig, we need this story, it's affecting my property. We've got to slam these people,’" recalls that person. "He was told 'This is destroying my property, we've got to stop it.' If it had been anybody else's property, would they be sending the helicopter there to see it? No way in hell."

In its story on the Westvaco pollution, the Baltimore Sun describes Smith as a "landowner on the Potomac," and the Allegany County clerk's office shows at least one Smith property in the area — a 3.65-acre parcel near Rawlings — owned by Smith's mother. The newscast didn't disclose Smith's alleged connection to the story, nor did it refrain from interviewing a representative of Safe Waterways in Maryland (SWIM), an advocacy group founded by Smith.

"We did the story because it was a worthwhile story," says Demchak, denying knowledge of Smith's property and Sinclair's relationship to SWIM, a surprising oversight given that the organization counts six Smiths among its 11 trustees — including Sinclair CEO David, vice presidents Frederick and J. Duncan, and mother Carolyn. Repeated calls to Smith's office and WBFF's news director were not returned, but Demchak insists that the personal interests of the Smith family had nothing to do with the story. A newsroom staffer disagrees: "They don't care about news. They care about moving their agenda, whether it's clearing up their property in Western Maryland or moving their political candidates to the forefront."

Charges that executives' interests, and not journalistic considerations, drive the company's news practices aren't new for Sinclair Broadcast Group, the owner of 62 stations nationwide and an assortment of ventures that trade in everything from cars to television transmitters to computer software. From its thwarted plan to force each of its stations to preempt programming days before the presidential election to air the anti-Kerry documentary Stolen Honor to its refusal to air the Nightline episode "The Fallen," which showed pictures and read the names of US soldiers who died in Iraq, the company's overt political biases have been a lightning rod for media activists.

Through the SinclairAction campaign (of which AlterNet is a part), some 36,000 emails were sent to Sinclair advertisers in protest of the planned airing of Stolen Honor, which prompted Staples, Inc., to not renew advertising contracts on local Sinclair news broadcasts. But while Sinclair drew considerable media attention for its political bias, a more nuanced form slipped under the radar — self-interested reporting on issues of financial import to the company or its executives.

A former producer remembers her first assignment as a Sinclair employee, a three-part series on high-definition television (HDTV). "I was told who I needed to interview, what questions I needed to ask, and then when I wrote my script, I had to take my script up to the vice presidents and get my script approved by them," she says. One of them, Technology Vice President Nat Ostroff, has "no connection to news, no knowledge of news whatsoever," she says.

"I'm doing three-minute packages on a subject that no one but them cares about and I'm interviewing only the people that they want me to interview in order to get the soundbites that they want," says the source." I told them I had a problem with it, and they said, 'Just get it done and you won't have to hear any more about it.'" As with the Nightline and Stolen Honor imperatives, all Sinclair stations were instructed to air the three-part series, whether they carry the network's centralized news program, NewsCentral, or not.

HDTV and DTV (digital television) are issues so high on Sinclair's priority list that CEO David Smith testified on them before a Senate committee and the FCC. And last week, the FCC dealt broadcasters like Sinclair a blow: the commission denied their request for "multi-cast must-carry," a provision that would require cable companies to make available all of a station's digital offerings to subscribers.

Paul Schmelzer is a Minneapolis-based writer. An editor at Adbusters, his work has appeared in Ode, Utne, The Progressive, and others.

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