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 — the corporate helicopter, a news crew, valuable air time
— to a story 160 miles from its headquarters. So far away, in fact,
that locals can’t even tune in to the broadcast. So far away that
there’s another major national market, Washington, D.C., 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 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, many of whom spoke only on the condition of anonymity.
One such staffer says that Sinclair vice president J.
Duncan Smith asked reporter 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 the staffer. “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, Md. — 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, 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 J. Duncan 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 television
stations nationwide, including Springfield’s WICS (Channel 20), and
an assortment of ventures that trade in everything from cars to television
transmitters to computer software. From its thwarted plan to force its
stations to pre-empt programming days before the presidential election to
air the anti–John Kerry documentary Stolen
Honor to its refusal to air the Nightline episode
“The Fallen,” in which pictures of U.S. soldiers who died in
Iraq were shown as host Ted Koppel read their names, the company’s
overt political biases have been a lightning rod for media activists.
Through the SinclairAction campaign, some 36,000
e-mails were sent to Sinclair advertisers to protest the planned airing of Stolen Honor. But even as
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 and its executives.
A former producer remembers her first assignment as a
Sinclair employee, a three-part series on high-definition television:
“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.”
One of them, vice president of new technology Nat
Ostroff, has “no connection to news, no knowledge of news
whatsoever,” the former producer 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 sound bites
that they want,” she recalls.
“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 carried the network’s
centralized-news program, NewsCentral, or not.
HDTV and digital television are issues so high on
Sinclair’s priority list that CEO David Smith testified on them
before a Senate committee and the Federal Communications Commission. And
last month the FCC dealt broadcasters such as Sinclair a blow, denying
their request for “multicast must-carry,” a provision that
would require cable companies to make available all of a station’s
digital offerings to subscribers.
When the congressionally mandated switch from analog
to digital television takes place in a few years, broadcasters will be able
to use the amount of spectrum that now can carry just one analog channel to
broadcast six (and eventually more) channels. But although the potential
for ad revenues can expand exponentially, broadcasters such as Sinclair
refused to consider increasing their public-service programming, which
sealed their fate with the FCC.
In a statement in which he singled out Sinclair,
commissioner Jonathan Adelstein explained his no vote:
“[W]ithout some baseline public-interest
obligations, I cannot conclude that every broadcaster will treat extra
digital program streams with the same sense of responsibility for local
service. . . . Recent events seem to validate claims that
broadcasters’ news coverage has been increasingly devoid of
information to help citizens participate in their democracy, or, worse yet,
promoting an ideology or unbalanced political agenda thinly disguised as
journalism.”
Refusing to transcribe corporate interests into
news is what ultimately got Jon Leiberman, former chief of Sinclair’s
Washington bureau, fired.
“For the most part, stories were dictated. . . .
I felt like I was part of a propaganda arm,” says Leiberman.
“I’d asked out of my contract three different times for ethical
reasons, saying that we were doing agenda-driven news and that wasn’t
the type of journalist I was.” He says that beyond the hard-right
tilt of VP Mark Hyman’s nightly commentaries on The Point, which are carried on dozens
of Sinclair stations, a better gauge of the company’s biases would
come from an analysis of the stories Sinclair chooses to cover.
“If you go through the newscasts — you
don’t even have to do it with a fine-tooth comb — you’ll
see how far to one end of the political spectrum they are,” Leiberman
says. “More so, if you look at the stories they’re choosing to
enterprise, stories that they’re putting together and shooting the
interviews out of D.C. and Hunt Valley [Md., headquarters of Sinclair].
Those are about 100 percent to one side of the political
spectrum.”
Company priorities were evident, he says, in the fact
that he and a crew were sent to New York to interview Stolen Honor author John
O’Neil the day before the book’s release — resulting in
three broadcast stories — yet Sinclair didn’t mention abuses at
Abu Ghraib until two weeks after the story broke elsewhere.
According to Leiberman, in the eight months leading up
to the 2004 presidential election, roughly out of every 10 news stories
reported by Sinclair’s Washington, D.C., bureau had a
pro–George W. Bush or anti-Kerry spin — a ratio that parallels
the proportion of anti-Kerry commentaries made by Hyman over 12 days in
September (10 of 12) and the percentage of the $2.3 million in campaign
contributions made by Sinclair employees to Republicans over the last eight
years (90 percent), as reported by the Center for Public Integrity.
Management’s conservative values became clear
after Sept. 11, 2001, when it required its anchors to read statements of
support for Bush, telling viewers that “We stand 100 percent behind
the President in his vow that terrorism must be stopped.” (The
company even launched a Web site, supportournation.com, in conjunction with
the on-air proclamations.)
But it wasn’t until Maryland’s 2002
gubernatorial elections that Leiberman realized just how far to the right
his bosses were. It was another time when J. Duncan Smith’s
helicopter — and ethics — made headlines.
The sole director of Whirlwind Aviation, Smith
provided then-candidate (and now governor) Republican Robert Ehrlich with a
luxurious Eurocopter Dauphin to use for campaign trips and a postelection
family vacation. Only after prodding by the Baltimore
Sun did Whirlwind turn over documents
indicating that the campaign was billed $1,000 an hour for what normally
would rent for $2,500 an hour. More than half of the $13,750 cost was
deemed an “in kind” campaign contribution — one that
wasn’t initially reported and therefore apparently violated
campaign-finance laws.
Why this generosity toward Ehrlich? In 2001, Ehrlich
wrote a letter urging the FCC to act on Sinclair’s request to
purchase TV stations. Christopher Hanson, of the University of
Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, told the Sun, “If you’re an
entity that owns a news outlet that is supposed to provide fair and
balanced coverage of the campaign, and yet at the same time are providing
aid to one of the candidates in the campaign, that puts them in a severe
position of conflict.”
Meanwhile, Sinclair’s news arm, led by Hyman,
took to lashing out at Ehrlich’s opponent, Democratic Lt. Gov.
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. In his commentaries Hyman called it a
“scandal,” for example, that an agency under Townsend’s
purview had failed to track certain gun purchases. Sinclair’s WBFF-TV
did its part by becoming the only media outlet to report that
Townsend’s staffers were the subject of a federal investigation into
the misuse of government anti-crime grants — allegations that were
never substantiated.
The former producer says another such “news
story” was planned by David Smith. At a dinner party he reportedly
heard “that Kathleen Kennedy Townsend was thrown from a horse and
that she might have some mental disability as a result . . . . They
assigned a producer to it who tried his darnedest to put a story together
because he was being rided [sic] on it and couldn’t get anyone to
confirm that she was thrown from a horse. It never ran because it was never
confirmed.”
To current employees, such efforts are just more
evidence of the lengths to which management will go to punish those they
oppose. Employees know, says one source, “that speaking to the media
is grounds for dismissal,” and others who have left the company are
now facing legal threats. Some employees believe that e-mails and phone
calls are monitored at the corporate offices, and former employees are
often told by friends on the inside to call only on cell phones.
Leiberman attributes Sinclair’s agenda-driven
news to, among other factors, a belief by David Smith and others that
“the media has been so liberal that they’re doing the right
thing by trying to balance the tables,” but another former producer
offers a more comprehensive view: “David Smith has very strong
political beliefs, and he felt that if he could use his media influences
— I mean, he owns 60-something stations — why not use it? And
at the same time he’d be making money because commercial time sells
better with news than it does with something like King of the Hill. ‘Hey, I can
make money, save money, and get out my political views.’”
If only such logic were successful. Dubbed one of the
“worst managers of 2004” by BusinessWeek, Smith can boast some less-than-stellar numbers: Since his
company’s stock tanked by 17 percent in the 11 days following the Stolen Honor controversy,
the share values remain 35 percent below the price one year ago. And after
seeing record-breaking political-advertising expenditures last year, the
company anticipates a 2 percent drop in revenue in the first quarter of
this year, despite a boost from its airing of the Super Bowl on some
stations.
But as Hyman suggested in a recent Rolling Stone story about the
company, maybe it’s not entirely about the money: “People
who’d never heard of us before suddenly knew who we were. We’re
on the map.”
Being known may be a mixed blessing for the company,
says David Bennahum, senior fellow with Media Matters for America.
“At a time when the television industry recorded strong earnings from
political advertising — 2004 logged more political-advertising
revenue than at any other time in history — Sinclair’s earnings
were lackluster, [with the company] underperforming less well-positioned
rivals,” he says.
“What other reason, apart from mismanagement,
can explain these dismal revenue numbers? Advertisers, the stock market,
and the public all punished Sinclair for placing a partisan political
agenda ahead of all other interests.”
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2005.
