[Mb-civic] The Eternal Twilight of the Sinclair Mind

Thu Oct 21 18:34:02 PDT 2004

The Eternal Twilight of the Sinclair Mind

By Paul Schmelzer, AlterNet
 Posted on October 20, 2004, Printed on October 21, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/20240/

Golly, gee whiz! That¹s 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? Š I certainly hope not. There shouldn¹t be."

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

 Here¹s 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 Š to avoid being drafted into the Army" and of "a lifetime of
supporting communist forces opposed to the U.S."

 Then there¹s 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 Hyman¹s bubble of feigned innocence. On Monday, one of
Sinclair¹s own, Washington bureau chief Jon Leiberman, told the Baltimore
Sun that the company¹s 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 he¹d been complaining to his news director, managing editor, and
even CEO David Smith about Sinclair¹s 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. It¹s a culture of fear. But I know in
my heart what they¹re doing is wrong. It¹s not fair and balanced Š It¹s pure
propaganda, and they¹re 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 paper¹s
owner Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

 ABC¹s 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."

 Democrats and media reformers allege that it is Sinclair that is
undermining the democratic process by refusing to adhere to Federal Election
Commission rules; they say the film amounts to an illegal in-kind donation
to the Republican Party.

 Even the name of their flagship product, NewsCentral, indicates a curious
approach to journalism: local news that isn¹t. One-size-fits-all news
segments are created at the home office in Hunt Valley, Md., and piped to
its affiliate stations cross-country. The local station  be it an affiliate
of ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, UPN, or the WB  then mixes the segments with live
broadcasting to create the illusion of local news. In some cases, personnel
at the local station have to coach on-air personalities at Sinclair central
casting on tough regional pronunciation of town names.

 This top-down model reflects the authoritarian, hierarchical structure at
Sinclair described by Leiberman: "Everything is dictated. Ideas are funneled
down from the highest levels." He says CEO David Smith would often appear
"in the newsroom and toss out ideas that ended up in the evening
broadcasts." In fact, several days ago, Leiberman says, a proposed story on
a new report critical of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld¹s handling of the
Iraq war was quickly spiked.

Leiberman, a registered Democrat who voted for George W. Bush in 2000,
insists that right and wrong, not left or right, should govern decisions in
the newsroom. It's why the graduate of Northwestern¹s Medhill School of
Journalism took a textbook approach when he accompanied Hyman to Iraq in
February 2004 to, in Hyman¹s words, report the "good news" of what was going
on there. While Leiberman filed a range of stories from how horseracing
affected the local economies to profiles of members of the Coalition
Provisional Authority, Hyman "was only over there to pump the positive
side."

 These cheerleading sessions broadcast from Iraq seem all the more ironic in
the light of the Oct. 5 edition of Hyman's regular commentary, "The Point,"
which criticized CBS¹s recent "Memogate" scandal. Hyman accused CBS of
pushing "their political views in what was supposed to be an honest
newscast" and providing "the latest episode in the trend of major news
organizations abandoning their pact with the public of providing truthful,
unbiased, and balanced news."

Hyman's statement  in yet another instance of irony  nails the essence of
the now-defunct Fairness Doctrine, repealed by Reagan's FCC in 1987. The
doctrine required broadcast licensees to serve the "public interest" by
presenting controversial issues of public importance, and to do so in a
balanced, fair manner. Only two aspects of the doctrine remain in effect
today: the personal attack rule, which offers a person the opportunity to
respond once a character attack has been broadcast; and the political
editorial rule, which offers candidates the opportunity to respond to a
station's endorsement or criticism. While Sinclair has offered Kerry a
chance to appear as part of the "Stolen Honor" programming, it's unlikely
that the appearance will be fair or equal in terms of time and political
impact.

While most critics cite Sinclair¹s conservative bias for their desire to air
"Stolen Honor," other experts suggest an alternative explanation. "This
initiative is not for political interests but business interests," says
Timothy Karr, executive director of Media for Democracy. "They [were] doing
this to ensure their survival  and to ensure that the next four years
there¹s an administration that¹s as industry-friendly as the last four years
have been."

 Recent comments by Sumner Redstone, a longtime liberal Democrat and head of
CBS¹ and MTV¹s parent company, seem to back up Karr's analysis: "I vote for
what¹s good for Viacom." From a "Viacom standpoint, the election of a
Republican administration is a better deal," Redstone said, "because the
Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in,
deregulation and so on." (Viacom¹s own foray into tricky political speech
turf happened early this week when the company announced its refusal to air
political advocacy ads on MTV, Comedy Central and VH-1.)

It's true that if Kerry wins the election, Democrats will gain a majority on
the five-member Federal Communications Commission, says Jane Kirtley,
director of the University of Minnesota¹s Silha Center on Media Ethics and
Law. The FCC, headed by Bush appointee Michael "Son of Colin" Powell, defied
public opinion when it decided to loosen ownership caps in 2003. Some two
million comments flooded Congress and the FCC, overwhelmingly opposed to
allowing media companies to own more print and broadcast entities in a given
market. In the end, the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the
FCC¹s rule changes, putting such items as the relaxed Duopoly Rule lobbied
for by Sinclair (which would¹ve allowed the company to own more than one
station in certain markets) on the backburner.

 The temporary victory aside, the FCC has long lacked the regulatory teeth
to crack down on corporate excesses. "With the demise of the Fairness
Doctrine and the evisceration of the various rules governing political
editorials, the reality is that the FCC really has very limited authority,"
says Kirtley. Another four years of Bush and a Republican Congress could be
fatal for any remaining power held by the FCC  and more importantly for the
nascent media reform movement that may yet put some real muscle back in
federal oversight.

Given the company¹s long-term financial woes, four more years of sympathetic
regulators may be just what Sinclair needs  an FCC open to Sinclair's
mission to, as CEO Smith once said, get "as many TV stations as we can." The
debt-laden corporation posted a modest $24.4 million in net income last year
on revenues of $738.7 million  a marked improvement from the previous year
when it finished $565 million in the hole. Its stocks are currently down
52.9 percent from this time last year.

 But while the "Stolen Honor" controversy may have made a Bush-league
broadcaster a household name  and attempted to help the Bush re-election
effort  the effect of such partisan pandering may prove to be the company's
undoing in the long run.

 "If I was a shareholder in Sinclair, I¹d be absolutely mortified," says
John Dunbar, project manager in media and telecommunications at the Center
for Public Integrity. "All it¹ll do is create controversy, lose advertisers
and create a lot of animosity." According to the New York Times, investment
bankers agree. As Blair Levin of Legg Mason and formerly of the FCC put it,
"Deregulation usually happens when you do it quietly." A report from his
bank delivered its verdict on the controversy: "Is this good for investors
in terms of increasing the odds of favorable deregulation? Š We think not."

The controversy already fueled a grassroots protest targeting not just
Sinclair, but also its advertisers. And Leiberman predicts that the stations
will lose viewers "by being skewed to one side." So in the end, the GOP's
most ardent supporter may yet pay a heavy price for sacrificing principle to
partisanship and profit. So it's no wonder even Bush's die-hard corporate
supporter is having second thoughts.