Senator Joe McCarthy on Ed Murrow news program in 1954 to defend himself against accusations of lying
The Sinclair Broadcast Group is a powerful player in the media in the United States. News programmes on its television stations have lost all independence and must obey their owners’ wishes to slant presentations towards a politically conservative, pro-Bush adminstration line.
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Senator Joe McCarthy on Ed Murrow news program in 1954 to defend himself against accusations of lying |
THE president and chief executive officer of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, David Smith, usually avoids reporters, but in the hours we spent together he spoke openly and passionately about the problems with network television news, the role of a media owner, and his plans for the local television stations under his control. “Somewhere along the line,” he preached, “we all have a social responsibility to attempt to do the right thing. The right thing is kind of a broad, encompassing area, but there are some things that are pretty obvious.”
The most important was about politics. “Your politics should not be involved in your business,” he told me. “From a news content perspective, if we can’t do it down the middle, and I find out about it, it’s going to be a problem.” It sounds good, until he explains that, of all the major United States media companies, only Sinclair and Fox occupy the centre, with the remaining 99.9% on the left (1).
Smith has a clear view of how a balanced news company should cover US foreign policy. “We’re in the midst of a war, right or wrong, I can’t help that. The government’s made a conscious decision to go to war because they believe it’s in our best interest. Since they’ve committed that act, right or wrong, I think we have an obligation to lend support to the troops and that people are going to have to go fight that war. So, by definition, I have to support the president. I can’t in good conscience stand on the sidelines when somebody has committed hundreds of thousands of people to defend me.”
In the past decade, Sinclair Broadcast Group has quietly taken advantage of the deregulation process orchestrated by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to become the largest owner of US television outlets, with 62 stations in 39 markets and access to at least 24% of US viewers, including those in key swing states such as Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Though Sinclair lacks outlets in high-profile Democratic cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, it has taken over one or two stations in mid-size cities where it can influence voters without much national scrutiny.
In 2004 Sinclair made its first high profile interventions in politics, using its broadcast licences to smear the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and to keep bad news about the war in Iraq off the air. “The media is politics,” Smith said during the day I spent at his company’s headquarters in suburban Baltimore. “The media elects politicians and then eats them for lunch.”
Nerve centre Sinclair’s nerve centre is News Central, a top-down production system through which Smith, vice-president and on-air personality Mark Hyman, plus loyal managers, dictate what local stations can and cannot run, creating an on-air Republican PR factory disguised as a news company (2).
The most prominent News Central segment is The Point, a nightly editorial hosted by Hyman that Sinclair forces its stations to broadcast. Hyman, 47, is a Navy man and former intelligence officer who carries a prisoner of war/missing in action bracelet, engraved with the name of a US war casualty from the Persian Gulf, to remind himself of the cost of freedom. He wears many hats at Sinclair, from vice-president to head of lobbying. In his spare time he is also vice president of the Centre for Science-Based Public Policy in Annapolis, not far from Sinclair’s headquarters. The research findings published by this thinktank, which has received more than $650,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998, include assertions that “the mercury levels found in fish have no adverse effects on human health” and that air pollution “cannot be a major cause of asthma”.
Hyman wears his hair in a wave, swaggers around the office, and on camera spouts rightwing invective with all the subtlety of a B-grade shock jock. He notoriously dismissed the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”. As for his fellow Americans, he identifies progressives as “the least generous people in America” or the “blame America crowd,” and attacks major television networks for “skewed news coverage and bias”. He charges the UN weapons inspector and critic of the war in Iraq, Hans Blix, and “his band of Keystone investigators” with incompetence for failing to find weapons of mass destruction.
A few weeks before the presidential election of November 2004, Hyman asserted that “terrorist leaders would dearly love to see President Bush replaced by Senator Kerry” and offered ridiculously low estimates of Iraqi casualties in the current war. Hyman champions regressive tax reforms, such as a flat tax or a national sales tax, that would take from the middle class and give to the rich; the privatisation of Medicare and Medicaid, even if it means ending guaranteed healthcare for the elderly and the poor; the rights of gun-owners; and the war in Iraq.
No matter how much negative feedback his editorials generate, Sinclair station managers have learned not to request permission to keep him - or other politically-charged programmes from the central office - off the air. As Smith told me, Sinclair’s philosophy of media management is that “a news organisation, to all intents and purposes, is a dictatorship. Somebody has got to be in charge.”
When CNN asked Hyman why Sinclair will not let its affiliates select their own content, Hyman explained how he views the local operations. “Just like Sears tells all of its stores, ‘You will sell Craftsman tools’, or McDonald’s tells all of its restaurants, ‘You will have a sesame seed bun’ - that’s the business we’re in. To suggest that our stations are all simply stand-alone franchises and that the local general manager can make any decision he wants about the programme he carries is actually factually incorrect” (3).
In the newsroom too According to current and former Sinclair employees, Hyman’s editorial voice also echoes through the newsroom, determining their story selection and slanting their journalism. After 9/11, Sinclair forced all its newsrooms to have a reporter or anchor state the station’s support for President George Bush and the war on terror. If they refused on journalistic principle, Hyman would listen, and then tape it for them himself.
Sometimes promoting a rightwing agenda means not airing bad news. That is what happened in April 2004, when Sinclair forbade its ABC affiliates to broadcast The Fallen, a Nightline special in which Ted Koppel read the names of US soldiers killed in Iraq. Jon Leiberman, Sinclair’s former DC bureau chief, reports that his news manager, citing pressure from the top, consistently denied his requests to report on the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. An ex-producer reported: “On at least two occasions that I remember, [my boss] told me that he didn’t want any bad news out of Iraq. It had to be good news.”
Sinclair has come a long way since 1971, when Julian Sinclair Smith obtained a UHF license and set up WBFF, which was a small, family broadcasting company in Baltimore. In 1986 his four sons - David, Frederick, Robert, and J Duncan - joined him to build a large television consolidating company that they called the Sinclair Broadcast Group. In 1990 the brothers took over and, as the company’s website says, “set out to make their vision a reality”.
David already had some experience as a media entrepreneur. In the 1970s he partnered David E Williams in Ciné Processors, a small business that reproduced pornographic films. When I spoke to him, Williams confirmed the paradoxical participation of one of the US right’s most prominent propagandists for moral and religious causes: “We had the lab in operation for like a year. We got videotapes copied on to film and put the soundtrack on a cassette. All you had to do was get the film and the sound in sync and you had something that was not available anywhere. We’d just solicit guys in the strip joint area and tried to sell them.”
Today the Smith brothers keep busy with other entrepreneurial projects, some of which take advantage of unconventional synergies with their television empire. David has major investments in car dealerships that are among the largest advertisers in Baltimore, and he benefits nicely when they buy commercials on his station. Frederick owns a real estate company, Todd Village LLC which, according to Baltimore’s WBAL-TV news, has been accused of discriminating against African-Americans by refusing to show them residential properties that they willingly showed to whites. The brothers also play the market and raised suspicions of insider trading when they sold millions of dollars of Sinclair stock near its peak value.
‘A gross disservice’ The company’s conservative philosophy would explain why Sinclair refused to let its stations air The Fallen. But Smith and Hyman claim that they made the decision because the names were being read out of context (despite ABC’s extensive and often pro-Bush coverage of the war) and because the programme coincided with the anniversary of Bush’s embarrassing “Mission Accomplished” speech of 2 May 2003. Veterans’ families and public officials - including Republicans and Democrats who supported the war - did not buy it. Neither did former PoW and US Senator John McCain, who wrote in an open letter to David Smith: “Your decision to deny your viewers an opportunity to be reminded of war’s terrible costs, in all their heartbreaking detail, is a gross disservice to the public.” Sinclair’s attempt to whitewash the war effort was, he suggested, “unpatriotic”.
Smith has a hard time explaining why his “commitment to balance and neutrality” does not extend to political contributions. During our meeting Smith looked me in the eye and asked: “Are you aware that I give more money to Democrats than I do Republicans?” I was not, so I asked two non-partisan organisations, the Centre for Public Integrity and the Centre for Responsive Politics, to examine Smith’s contribution records. Both found that, at the federal level, the overwhelming majority of Smith’s gifts had gone to Republicans.
Contributions by Sinclair employees and managers are even more skewed to the right. Since 1998 more than nine of every $10 donated have gone to Republicans, a figure far out of keeping with other broadcasting companies, which usually hedge their bets and give more evenly. Executives at the Texas radio giant Clear Channel Communications Inc, which is known, like Sinclair and Fox, for its rightwing programming and conservative connections, directed over one-third of their contributions to Democrats.
Smith also has no persuasive explanation for why Sinclair’s news and commentaries hew either to the conservative party line, or just to the right of it. He became defensive when I asked why he did not add some liberal editorials to balance conservative segments. “The Point represents two minutes of an hour-long newscast. It’s less than the weather,” he insisted, minutes after Hyman had bragged that viewers in Sinclair’s local markets usually remember him more than their local anchors.
Laughing off their critics, Sinclair executives have tightened their grip on the broadcast group and the News Central operation. When Hyman took me on a long tour of the headquarters, our first stop was the graphics department, where cyber-generation designers produced an MTV-style promotional package for News Central, pumped up by electronica and heavy dance beats. “We’re going for a younger demographic,” Hyman said. “So there’s a certain look we’re going for. Generally, the anchors we have are younger. The graphics are really network quality, not the stuff you get from ordinary local news.” A graphic designer explained that, throughout the group, “The biggest concept is to make a centralised look across the board.”
Plenty of weather Sinclair’s weather reporters take the act to another level. The meteorology staff of eight to 10 on-air personalities works from Sinclair’s offices in Hunt Valley, in Maryland, where they keep stacks of atlases, study regional maps, and practice pronouncing the names of places they have never been to. Each member does weather reports, as well as editing, operating the camera, selecting graphics, and distributing the segments, for three to five cities a day. There is a real economy in this, as Hyman explains: “It takes just a few minutes a day to put together a weather segment. That’s why meteorologists are always the ones doing public affairs work for TV stations, going to county fairs and school events. We said, what if instead we had meteorologists doing weather all day long? Viewers don’t care if the weather man is in a studio in Oklahoma City, or in College Park, or here.” The Sinclair meteorologist who showed us the system, James Wieland, added: “A lot of people are surprised that we’re not even there.”
Television industry critics find this kind of fake localism deceptive, creepy and possibly dangerous. It is easy to see why. Hyman and Wieland showed me three weather reports done the previous day by Sinclair’s chief meteorologist, Vytas Reid. For Buffalo, New York, he invited viewers to “take a look at what’s coming our way”. For Flint, Michigan, he reported on the strong winds “just south of us”. And for Raleigh, North Carolina, he summarised the weather that “we got to see”. He exchanges banter with the anchors, who send their scripts to News Central before the newscast, performing as if he is right beside them. Many worry that the act will break down in extreme weather, when a meteorologist’s firsthand observations of the climate and intimate knowledge of local geography can help citizens and communities decide how to protect themselves. Hyman insists that Sinclair can take care of the problem by having their News Central team do live coverage during disasters.
Sinclair’s affiliates not only lack meteorologists, they also have skeletal reporting and production staffs for ordinary local news. The group uses digital systems and prepackaged news content to automate production and keep labour costs down. According to Hyman: “It’s not that we dislike editors or cameramen, it’s just that the technology has gotten to such a point that our directors feel that they even do a better job with the joystick operating cameras two and three. So now you build a newsroom, it may be one less producer, maybe one less reporter, no tape editors, two less camera operators, and the list goes on and on.” Hyman estimates that Sinclair has laid off about “three dozen people” overall. But that’s hard to square with the figures given by the industry website JournalismJobs.com, which listed 229 redundancies at Sinclair stations in a single year.
Much of Sinclair’s public relations rhetoric falls apart under analysis. Hyman claims that Sinclair designed the News Central model to start low-cost newscasts on stations that never had local news, which is true in some cases. But Sinclair also bought network affiliates with flourishing news programmes, slashed staffing levels and converted them to the News Central model despite intense local complaints. In St Louis, Missouri, Sinclair closed the entire news division. The truth is that the group’s news output is doing badly in most markets. Even its flagship station, Baltimore’s WBFF, is losing viewers rapidly.
Hyman acknowledges that “there are certain motivations being in the news business; 30 to 35% of the advertisers in any typical market only buy on local news. If you’re looking at pure dollars and cents, do we want to be in a business where, at best, we’re only competing for 70% of the advertising dollars?” Most local stations are not economically viable without news. And Sinclair needs money. It is saddled with debt from its aggressive acquisition strategy, and its revenues (less than $750m in 2003) lag behind those of its rivals (4).
Poor stories So does the quality of its reporting. Researchers who compared election coverage in different local markets concluded that the stories run by Sinclair stations were typically fewer, shorter and of inferior quality than those of its competitors. Testifying before the Senate commerce committee in 2003, the associate dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg school of communications, Martin Kaplan, reported that in Greenville, South Carolina, “WSPA, a Media General station, aired 146 campaign stories on their top-rated early and late half hours of news during the seven weeks before election day [in 2002], while WLOS, a Sinclair station, aired 40. The average candidate soundbite on the Sinclair station was seven seconds long, while the Media General station averaged 36 seconds” (5).
But Sinclair always finds time for attacks on Democrats, which explains why Smith and Hyman were so eager to get their hands on Stolen Honor. This controversial documentary, released during the presidential campaign, claimed that Democratic candidate John Kerry, a decorated volunteer in Vietnam (unlike George Bush, who contrived to stay clear of fighting), had, upon his return, undermined national morale by attacking US crimes in southeast Asia and had encouraged Vietnamese resistance. Within days of receiving the documentary, Sinclair instructed its affiliate stations, particularly those in 20 swing states including Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, to suspend their scheduled programmes in order to broadcast it. Members of the newsroom staff reported (under cover of anonymity) that Hyman had taken control of the programme. “We were told that it would be Mark Hyman’s show and that he was going to host it,” a member of the News Central staff told me. Early in October 2004, television schedules announced Stolen Honor: The Point Special Edition.
When the Kerry campaign team learned that the programme was due to go out just days before voting, it asked federal authorities to prevent Sinclair using its broadcasting licence to influence the election, and demanded that advertising revenue generated by the broadcast should be included in Republican campaign expenses, as if they constituted a gift to Bush by Sinclair. Media reform groups organised an advertiser boycott.
The investment bank Lehman Brothers released a statement announcing that “Sinclair’s decision to pre-empt programming to air Stolen Honor is potentially damaging both financially and politically” and reduced its valuation of the company. The rating agency Moody’s downgraded its outlook from “stable” to “negative”. Sinclair’s stocks tumbled by 17%. Major institutional investors demanded that Sinclair cut the programme.
The controversy rocked Sinclair’s newsroom, too. News Central staffers were demoralised by the management’s decision and worried about another blow to their professional standing as journalists. In private, they complained that Hyman’s presence in the newsroom was overbearing, that “producers were scared”, and that during the election and the war in Iraq “we went to our editorial meetings and were pretty much told what stories we were doing”.
The announcement that Stolen Honor would be a news special pushed Jon Leiberman past his limit. “I had already told the CEO that it would have a devastating impact on my bureau, from a newsgathering standpoint. So I stood up [at a staff meeting] and said, ‘It’s absolutely ridiculous that in order to validate this, we’re going to call it news’. I knew it was a huge risk . . . [but] I knew that people felt what I felt, they just weren’t saying it.” His former co-workers agree, but did not want to say so on record, for fear that they would lose their jobs or be stigmatised as whistleblowers in a journalistic labour market increasingly dominated by a small number of giant players.
Leiberman also decided to make his concerns public. He called a media writer at the Baltimore Sun, hoping that some local exposure would force Sinclair to alter its plans. The story circulated quickly on the internet. A few hours later, Sinclair managers called Leiberman into an immediate meeting. “At that point, I knew what was happening, so I packed up my belongings and I went up to Hunt Valley. I was told that what I had done is wrong. And they told me that I was being terminated because I released proprietary information from that Sunday meeting to the media. I would no longer receive benefits, I would not receive severance, my pay was stopped immediately, and I wouldn’t get any unused vacation time. They escorted me out to my car, and had me empty my pockets, and treated me like a criminal, and that was that. I haven’t been near that building since.”
Firing a star reporter did not solve Sinclair’s problems. The next day there was an announcement from a shareholder filing a suit against the group for placing its political agenda before its fiduciary responsibilities. Within hours Sinclair stated that it would not be broadcasting Stolen Honor in its entirety, but would instead run an edited and significantly truncated version as part of a general debate on the influence of the media during elections. A PoW Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media aired on 22 October 2004, 11 days before voting. Viewing figures were mediocre; most critics found it relatively neutral, and dull. Media reform groups viewed the outcome as a minor success.
Since Bush’s re-election, polls have indicated that Americans regard media reform as a major issue. This is bad news for the big media companies pushing for the FCC to relax its ownership restrictions in coming years. As the former FCC official chief of staff, and now a private equity analyst, Blair Levin, points out, “deregulation usually happens quietly”. But with the unwilling assistance of the Sinclair group, the emerging US media movement is learning how to make noise.
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Adapted from the original English text
(1) See Eric Alterman, “United States: making up news”, Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, March 2003.
(2) The magazine Rolling Stone, which supported this research, will publish further results over the next few months and published Klinenberg’s first article on Sinclair in February 2005.
(3) See Bush, Kerry Focus on Domestic Issues, Washington Post, Dana Milbank, october 2004 12th.
(4) See Company Organization Information, Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., on the Center for Public Integrity website.
(5) See http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/testimony.cfm?id=874&wit_id=2426
More about Eric Klinenberg: http://mondediplo.com/_Eric-Klinenberg_
source: http://mondediplo.com/2005/10/14klinenberg 21oct2005
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