The Eternal Twilight of the Sinclair Mind

By Paul Schmelzer, AlterNet. Posted October 20, 2004.

Golly, gee whiz! That’s what Mark Hyman, VP of Corporate Relations at the Sinclair Broadcast Group, seemed to be saying when asked if his company, the largest owner of local TV stations in the country, is biased against John Kerry: "Why would you say that? … I certainly hope not. There shouldn’t be."

Goodness, how could anyone come to such an outlandish conclusion?

Here’s how: in mid-September, 10 commentaries delivered on-air by Hyman in a 12-day period bashed the Democratic candidate. He accused Kerry of joining "the Navy … to avoid being drafted into the Army" and of "a lifetime of supporting communist forces opposed to the U.S."

Then there’s the fact that nearly 90 percent of the $2.3 million in political contributions made by Sinclair and its executives within the last eight years went to Republicans (including 97 percent of the nearly $68,000 donated this cycle alone).

And, oh yeah, the company first planned to pre-empt regular programming on all 62 of its stations to air an anti-Kerry film days before the presidential election – during primetime, without commercials, and without the opportunity for an equal response by Kerry or his supporters. "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal" brands Kerry as a traitor and a "willing accomplice" of the enemy for his activism against the Vietnam War.

That Sinclair has since backed away from its original plan – announcing Tuesday that it would only air a special one-hour news program, entitled "A POW Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media" – is in itself the sign of the power of grassroots organizing. The company refuses to admit that the protests – which resulted in a $105,000,000 financial loss since Oct. 8 – had any impact on its decision. According to its press release, "Contrary to numerous inaccurate political and press accounts, the Sinclair stations will not be airing the documentary 'Stolen Honor' in its entirety. At no time did Sinclair ever publicly announce that it intended to do so."

Right!

More genuinely shocking than Sinclair's rabidly partisan bias or its disingenuous attempt to hide the same is that someone actually had the courage to burst Hyman’s bubble of feigned innocence. On Monday, one of Sinclair’s own, Washington bureau chief Jon Leiberman, told the Baltimore Sun that the company’s planned airing of "Stolen Honor" is "biased political propaganda, with clear intentions to sway this election."

By 5 p.m. on the same day, Leiberman had been tagged a "disgruntled employee" who let his "political leanings get in the way." He was escorted from the company headquarters in Maryland, and shut out of the Sinclair e-mail system.

"I got fired because I spoke out," he said in an interview with AlterNet. For months he’d been complaining to his news director, managing editor, and even CEO David Smith about Sinclair’s news slant, which he says tilts 10-to-1 against Democrats. But when his complaints were ignored, he went public.

"Nobody will speak out at Sinclair. It’s a culture of fear. But I know in my heart what they’re doing is wrong. It’s not fair and balanced … It’s pure propaganda, and they’re trying to shoehorn what should be a format for editorials or commentary into news," Leiberman says.

"News" is an iffy term at Sinclair. The anti-Kerry documentary is labeled as newsworthy despite the dubious journalistic background of its creator Carlton Sherwood – a past employee of Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge, a former Washington Times columnist, and fawning biographer of the paper’s owner Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

ABC’s Nightline's reading of the names of 700 military personnel killed in Iraq, however, failed to meet Sinclair's definition of "news." In that now-infamous case, Sinclair refused to air the Nightline program in April 2004 on the grounds that the broadcast was "motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq."

Paul Schmelzer is a writer based in Minneapolis. An editor at Adbusters magazine, he has written for Ode, The Progressive, Raw Vision and Utne.

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