Forced down throats . . .

by Cliopatria

I suppose this might be the right crowd to help give me just one justification of the abominable stuff going on with Sinclair Broadcasting Group. This is the group with control over perhaps 25% of the nation’s tv airwaves that is forcing all of its affiliates to air a vicious smear “documentary” about Kerry. This is the same group, you might recall, that ordered its affiliates not to air the Nightline episode that simply listed the names of the soldiers who had died in Iraq.

Today’s Timeslead op-ed seems to get it just about right. The best coverage I have seen on the blogs comes from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. (Not hyperlinked because he has coverage throughout the blog). Best of the Blogs also has a blurb, as does Chuck Currie, who describes himself as a United Church of Christ seminarian.

Of course this is just a small sample. What I have not heard is a credible defense of this. I think the Times gets it right when they aver that it would be just as offensive if a network forced its affiliates to air “Fahrenheit 9-11.” If stopping this affront to the democratic process is not in the public interest, what is?

Suffice it to say, the owners of Sinclair are Republicans who have donated a great deal to GOP causes. This would be fine -- just as I have always argued that the fact that a journalist is a Democrat is not prima facie proof that she cannot do her job well and fairly, a media company owner's political affiliation is not determinative of their ability to run their company fairly. Except, of course, when the evidence, the facts, show that they cannot. In this case, the evidence is clear. Sinclair is using its airways to try to sway the public vote in ways that clearly violate the FCC rules, guidelines, and principles that allowed them to get a license in the first place. This is an outrage.

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Derek Charles Catsam - 10/15/2004

The comparison is not all that valid though -- something presented on the news is not the same thing as forcing stations to carry something that has the imprimatur of the network and that is a hack piece against one or the other candidate. The news certainly gives equal time to all candidates. And while it is true that no one is forced to watch, the fact that the idological slant in intended for an election is the most problematic aspect of all. there is still not a scintilla of evidence that rather knew the documents were forged before he presented them, whereas the bias 9and patent falsity) of (much of) this hack piece is clear.
the response to CBS's program is an absurd context. the response comes from the fact that the nightly news constantly shifts terrain -- that whenever the president is on the air (and he is on the air more than anyone) the nightlt news is not forced to give equal time to refute everything. Or does CBS also have a responsibility to give equal time to anti-war folks because WMDs turned out not to be true? It's just a false comparison. A more useful comparison would have been the reagan biopic that was scuttled, also for ideological purposes, but the difference, and it is huge, was that the regan pic was not intended as campaign material. This demonstrably is. AND it is not a part of network programming decisions, but rather is an example of a conglomerate forcing stations to interrupt network programming to show this. These are huge differences.
dc

Richard Henry Morgan - 10/15/2004

It seems to me that all concentrations of power in the media have a certain possibility for suspicion. The Sinclair case is one of many. It is compounded by the involvement of the FCC. The granting of a license is supposedly for the public interest, but this is a requirement honored and enforced mostly in the breach, if at all. The best thing about this situation is that it seems to have killed the usual liberal response to criticism of television media bias (that one doesn't have to watch it, after all).

It would be interesting to explore the dividing line between CBS' and Rather's anti-Bush crockumentary, and this one. I can think of at least one difference, and perhaps some can offer others that will significantly distinguish the cases; Sinclair has offered to broadcast Kerry's response. I'm racking my memory, but even after Rather blamed all criticism on right-wing hacks out to get him, and after he defended the broadcast on the grounds it relied on an "unimpeachable source", I can't seem to remember that CBS offered to broadcast a response to their program. Is that true, or just another case of my increasingly faulty memory?