About Sinclair (p3)

Commentary, continued

Wilkes-Barre (PA) Times-Leader (13 Oct 2004)
Just when you thought press coverage of the presidential race couldn't get any dirtier and uglier, a media monolith turns Decision 2004 into a mud-slinging, sh*t-smearing partisan mission...

A media outlet forcing the broadcast of a one-sided documentary on national, non-cable television is an abuse of public airwaves and a gross abandonment of journalistic responsibility and objectivity.

Imagine the political outcry if Michael Moore's anti-Bush opus, "Fahrenheit 9/11," were to be aired so close to the election, let alone on ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX primetime and with no commercials?

St. Petersburg (FL) Times (14 Oct 2004)
It may be true that Stolen Honor, a documentary assembled by journalist Carlton Sherwood, is a newsworthy look at the impact of Kerry's antiwar statements. Even if Sherwood, a decorated Vietnam veteran who later won a Pulitzer Prize among a team of reporters at Gannett News Service, also has faced allegations he allowed the Unification Church's founder, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, to unduly influence a book he wrote on Moon's legal troubles after working at his conservative newspaper, the Washington Times...

Indeed, the only thing more absurd than Sinclair trying to pretend this isn't a last-minute sucker punch to Kerry is the Democratic National Committee petitioning the Federal Election Commission to rule the broadcast an in-kind donation to President Bush's campaign...

As right-leaning media outlets go, Sinclair has been brazen in its ham-fisted support of the Republican Party and Bush administration, in April forbidding the ABC stations it owned from airing an edition of Nightline called "The Fallen," which simply listed all the U.S. troops killed in Iraq to that point. "Mr. Koppel's reading of the fallen will have no proportionality," Hyman told the New York Times in April. It's right in line with the interests of Republican supporter and Sinclair CEO David Smith, whose company has given $309,436 to the GOP since 1993, according to PoliticalMoneyLine.com (compared to $42,400 for Democrats). It's also the nightmare many activists predicted would come of allowing one company too much media ownership.