If you can peel your eyes off of the Jennifer Aniston photo spread in the December GQ, you'll find a story even more important than musings on Jen's marital discord. In a longish report, journalist Wil S. Hylton examines the Sinclair Broadcast Group and its unprecedented push into the marketplace—60 stations nationwide to date.
Hylton details how the company's owners, four brothers named Smith, courted GOP politicians, who then helped the company skirt FCC regulation; to ensure that the party remains in power, according to the piece, Sinclair forces its stations to air slanted commentaries that masquerade as news. You may remember Sinclair as the company that wouldn't let its stations air the Nightline episode in which Ted Koppel read the names of U.S. forces killed in Iraq, and which reportedly had plans to air the anti-Kerry documentary Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal just prior to the 2004 presidential elections (the company claimed it never announced plans to air the full movie but went on to broadcast excerpts as part of a news program, A POW Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media).
Since Las Vegas has two Sinclair stations (WB and KFBT Gold 33) we asked Hylton a few questions:
How do they get away with all that?
They've been very, very lucky to make their drive toward omnipotence during a time when the FCC is controlled by a very business-friendly GOP. If they had tried at a time when another president had been in office, and therefore a different set of appointees in regulatory bodies, they probably wouldn't have been able to do it.
There's a lot more tension inside the FCC about Sinclair than you might imagine. The primary dissenting voice in the FCC has been a commissioner named Michael J. Copps, and he's just livid about the way the commission has handled Sinclair's rush into the marketplace, and the way that Sinclair has sort of been tacitly approved to skirt the law.
Copps was thought to be the new chairman if Kerry had been elected, which is one of the reasons Sinclair had to struggle so mightily to make sure that didn't happen.
What do Sinclair's practices mean for A.) the individual viewer on his couch; and B.) the larger society?
Well, it creates a scenario where the viewer on his couch has no idea whether what he's seeing is coming from a local news organization that prizes objectivity and fact-finding—or a terrifying facsimile of that that's been substituted secretly during one of his blinks. The program may begin as a news show at 6:30 or 7:30 and have local anchors trying to cover local politics, and you have a momentary pause and the screen fades to black, and when it comes back on, there's a different reporter walking through, say, Guantanamo or Iraq, and talking about how successfully the war is being waged. And there's no notice that this isn't coming from the local ABC branch. So the guy on his sofa might give this the same credence than he would to an accredited news source. The result of that is that there's a propaganda campaign being waged by Sinclair, and because it's being passed off as news, it's more likely to be effective.
Sinclair's isn't an entirely ideological conservatism, right? It's opportunistic, because that's who they're in bed with.
Right. In fact, they tried to court Democrats in the beginning. But the people they backed failed, and the Republicans they backed succeeded. I think their feet just kind of sunk into the party, because it happened to be that party's moment, and a few individuals just let 'em in and intervened with the FCC. And then a lot of the ideology was developed around Sinclair's programming in order to make sure that the same people who were helping them avoid regulatory issues would get re-elected.
I think it's a dangerous guessing game to try to figure out where the boundary is between what Sinclair's owners, the Smith brothers, actually believe and what they know they need to promote in order to keep their favorite politicians in power. It's clear they're not nearly as conservative as their moralistic screeds on the air. The principal owner is a notorious womanizer and has been arrested in the company car with a prostitute giving him a blow job. So when his mouthpiece is on the air waxing eloquently about the joys of 1950s family values, it's not an accurate reflection of his value system. It's a way to promote the GOP agenda and end up with the GOP in charge of the regulatory bodies.
Your piece alludes to a media silence—other news organizations have reported some of these things but haven't put it all together. Why not?
Probably the reason not a lot has been written about Sinclair is that it calls into question whether the reporter himself, and the publication or broadcast station, can claim to be above that standard. In other words, when you and I start talking about objectivity, we lay a trap for ourselves. Anybody can probably go through things you've written, things I've written, and pick out stuff that doesn't seem objective. And of course objectivity itself is a bit of a ruse. We all chose which quotes to use and which parts of the story are more important or more interesting, and those are judgment calls. It's very easy to cross the line, and I'm sure we all do it all the time without even meaning to. I think that people are reluctant at the reporting level to start hurling—he without sin cast the first stone, you know, and I think we all want to make sure we don't get accused of being subjective ourselves after we've just written some huge expose of biased news.
Is there any sense that Sinclair is due for a comeuppance?
As much as their stock got hit—and it did get hit tremendously—after news was announced that they were planning to run a documentary about Kerry, it was still a calculated risk on their part. From people I know inside the company, there was an understanding that this was an expense, this was overhead, this was an investment in keeping the FCC in Republican hands.
And as long as that's the case, they're relatively—
They're clear. They're free and clear. Until 2008. Or until Congress gets taken over by Democrats next year.