Off the Charts

On October 7th I was interviewed by Elizabeth Jensen, a media-beat reporter for the Los Angeles Times, who sometimes calls me for expert commentary. She had some news and wanted to get my reaction, but my first reaction was disbelief. My second reaction was: This is going to be huge. What she described sounded so improbable. (And in fact it never came to pass.)

On all 62 stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, at different times, on different nights, but close to the election – "like within ten days," she said – Sinclair was going to interrupt the prime-time programming offered by different networks in different cities where it owns affiliates, and put on the air "Stolen Honor," an anti-Kerry documentary – agitprop, as it used to be called – featuring former POWs in Vietnam who, in essence, charge John Kerry with treason for his anti-war efforts. And they were doing all this because....?

It didn't make any sense. You couldn't complete the because.

That is, it didn't make sense within any known model for operating a company that owns local television stations under U.S. law. Customary practice had always precluded a political intervention of any kind near the finish line of an election. Behind this custom was not some grand sense of the public interest shared among stations owners, but a cold realism about electoral politics. Start interfering in the horse race by backing the wrong horse and regulators from the hostile party are likely to make you pay if their guy wins.

In addition, contested elections divide markets; advertisers don't enjoy that one bit. Kerry voters buy cars and corn flakes, and they watch television. Advertisers don't want to choose between customer groups, and they don't want you, their community broadcaster, choosing, either. They don't want to be making political statements with their ad buys. Why would they?

In Search of Sinclair Logic

For all those reasons – commonsensical, "good business" reasons – plus a little matter of Federal law called the Fairness Doctrine, in force until recently, station owners have held back from any action that would seem to be aiding or attacking a candidate. And the closer to the election, the more cautious they have been. "Ordering stations to carry propaganda? It's absolutely off the charts," said former Federal Communications Commission chairman Reed Hundt, who served under Clinton.

Eric Bohlert of Salon spoke to Bob Zelnick, ex-Pentagon correspondent for ABC News, now chairman of the Department of Journalism at Boston University and "a self-described conservative who says he intends to vote for President Bush." Zelnick, who on other occasions might be defending a company like Sinclair, said, "Whether you're liberal or conservative, if you have roots in the journalism profession, there are core values that transcend and need to survive election to election. You avoid airing, very close to election, highly charged, partisan material that takes the guise of a documentary."

Sinclair was not only breaking with broadcast custom, it was smashing idols by threatening to show a 42-minute film, "Stolen Honor," which by any measure was "highly charged, partisan material." The interesting part to me was: Why risk it? Acquiring "Stolen Honor" with the intention of using it must have fit into Sinclair's plans for itself somehow, but how?

So I went in search of the Sinclair logic. This was a company I knew a little about from an earlier episode, equally strange in its way. Last April, Ted Koppel decided to read the names of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq on a Nightline. It was called "The Fallen." Sinclair sent a clear message: no way, Ted. We won't permit it on the eight ABC stations we own. Koppel said it was the first time anything like that had happened to Nightline. In an open letter to Sinclair executives, Senator John McCain denounced the company for refusing to air the program. Sinclair's CEO David Smith wrote a response giving no ground. Notice how his letter instantly politicizes what the "other side" is doing: