Last April, Sinclair Broadcasting made headlines by ordering its ABC affiliates not to air a Nightline segment in which Ted Koppel read the names of American soldiers killed in Iraq. Nightline, Sinclair fulminated, was attempting "to influence public opinion" and was "motivated by a political agenda."
Such considerations, surely, had nothing to do with Sinclair's recent diktat that its 62 stations (including Las Vegas' KVWB and KFBT, a.k.a. "Gold 33") run the 42-minute film Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal between October 21 and 24—a week and a half before Election Day. Produced by ex-Marine and former journalist Carlton Sherwood, the film, according to Los Angeles Times reporter Elizabeth Jensen, "features former POWs accusing [Sen. John] Kerry ... of worsening their ordeal by prolonging the Vietnam War," and is to be followed by a panel discussion featuring as-yet-unspecified participants. (Las Vegas Weekly's call to KVWB/KFBT was not returned. At Sinclair, speaking to external media outlets can be cause for dismissal.)
Filmmaker Sherwood, a former Washington Times staffer, is author of Inquisition: The Persecution and Prosecution of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a 705-page "investigative" tome, the contents of which were vetted, revised and approved by officials of the Unification Church. Sherwood also may know a thing or two about misappropriated honors: In 1980, Gannett News Service received a "Public Service" Pulitzer en bloc for coverage to which Sherwood contributed. In his online biography this becomes: "Sherwood won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative reporting of a Catholic scandal involving the Pauline Fathers of Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He also is known for his inside investigation of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church." Similarly, Sherwood takes solo credit for a 1982 Peabody Award that was given for team coverage at Oklahoma City's KOCO-TV.
Although Sinclair is billing Stolen Honor as a "documentary," the 527 group POWs for Truth (fellow travelers of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth 527, some of whose members appear in the film) announced it helped to finance Stolen Honor, in a September 29 press release.
The film is also being plugged on www.blogsofwar.com, a site that is concurrently promoting speculation in Iraqi currency. As it happens, Sherwood is executive vice president of WVC3 Group, a self-styled counter-terrorist outfit with an office in Baghdad. Sherwood's patrons include Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge, and WVC3 is the recipient of a government contract to build a website, www.firstresponder.gov. The latter was to have been operational last March but doesn't yet exist—perhaps because Sherwood took leave from WVC3 to make Stolen Honor.
He's not the only beneficiary of government largesse. Through its subsidiary, Sinclair Ventures, Sinclair Broadcasting is an investor in Jadoo Power Systems, which was awarded a Pentagon contract on September 28. Jadoo is tasked "to develop power systems for the U.S. Special Operations Command."
Sherwood's patrons at Sinclair—the brothers David, Frederick, Robert and Duncan Smith—have donated an aggregate $8,000 to Bush-Cheney '04, and Sinclair has swelled 2004 GOP coffers by at least $66,000 to date. Characterized by the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz as "the nation's largest collection of television stations," Sinclair owns 20 Fox affiliates, eight ABC ones, four NBC stations and three CBS outlets. Following the relaxation of ownership restrictions, Sinclair enjoys "duopolies" in 21 markets—including Las Vegas.
Federal Communications Commissioner Michael J. Copps has characterized the mandatory airing of Stolen Honor as "an abuse of the public trust." Keith Woods, dean of the St. Petersburg, Florida-based Poynter Institute (a nonprofit journalism school) equated it with running Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 as "news" programming. Sinclair's lead political reporter, Jon Leiberman, was sacked after he called the Stolen Honor broadcast "indefensible."
Out in the blogsphere, Joshua Micah Marshall writes, "I'm already getting reports from the field that many Sinclair advertisers are starting to communicate their concern to Sinclair." Complicating matters further, filmmaker Sherwood is now being sued for libel by another ex-Leatherneck, Kenneth J. Cleveland, who claims the film's portrayal of him is defamatory.
Perhaps the definitive—if unwitting—final word on the affair came from Sinclair editorialist and Big Brother stand-in Mark Hyman (who has equated the company's critics with Holocaust deniers). Castigating rival news orgs in one of his "The Point" segments, Hyman said "the news gatekeepers are further blurring the lines between fact and fiction to suit their political agenda." He ought to know.