> If anything Sinclair should be praised as an
> innovator for delivering news to viewers at a cost that made
> it feasible for them to do so.
Oh please. There are many Sinclair stations that are major network affiliates with robust news operations run locally before Sinclair execs in Baltimore put their mitts on them. Here in Rochester, our Fox affiliate formerly had a respected 10pm newscast that was butchered and tanked by Sinclair's "News Central" operation. They did so much damage, the Fox 10pm newscast is now produced by our local CBS affiliate.
If anything demonstrates what can happen when corporate cost cutting and interference goes too far, this is it. Even Sinclair now realizes the News Central concept was a failure, but they're still ordering their stations to carry "The Point" commentaries if they have their own newscasts.
Where real journalism is still practiced, such as at our local CBS affiliate that produces the newscast for Sinclair's local Fox station, they know dead fish when they smell it, so they got creative with Mark Hyman's nightly ravings. They end the newscast, say goodnight, run those credits, and then, for the seven remaining viewers who didn't click over to something else (or turn the set off), here comes The Point. Clever. I can only imagine what would happen if someone from Sinclair called our CBS station and demand that they mail them a tape and tell them how to run their newscast. That click they'd hear would be phone dropped back on the hook. Buh-bye.
> Everyone has an agenda. Journalists' agendas not only
> influence how a story is covered, but even more importantly,
> which stories are given attention in the first place.
> Watching CBS News, it is easy to see how they select and
> frame the stories from their political biases. I'm sure it
> was similarly easy to tell that the Point commentaries were
> not objective.
In any real journalistic enterprise with credibility, there is a firewall between station management and the news product. There is a line no honest news director will cross. Sinclair didn't just blur the line here, they burned down the firewall ordering blatantly slanted pieces onto their stations, monitored them to ensure no station dared to label them as "commentary" or an "editorial," and hired and fired people for News Central based on their personal politics. That's propaganda. That's the equivalent of State Television. Once your viewers realize it, the trust you have with your newsroom and its viewers is gone, probably forever.
I disagree with your comparison between CBS News and Sinclair. While there are conservative groups that have felt CBS has a bias that runs all the way back to Walter Cronkite and Vietnam, there is no equivalent of Mark Hyman on the CBS Evening News spending 2-3 minutes ranting about the French or saying that yanking Terry Schiavo's feeding tube was murder. Sorry, this is apples and oranges.
> Again, Sinclair should be praised for its public
> commitments. It's not converting these stations to
> infomercial, religious or foreign-language formats.
I sincerely doubt Sinclair is going to buy a decent sized market's ABC affiliate and then decide to convert it to a VHF home shopping channel or religion. Let's be real here. Sinclair isn't Paxson Communications, or some other entity buying and launching low power UHF outlets or rimshot UHF channels that were running independent programming, religion, or Telemundo.
No praise should be forthcoming to a corporation that turns the equivalent of a Lord & Taylor news operation into Dollar General. The commitment was never about the public, it was about the profit and their agenda to expand (skirting FCC ownership rules along the way).
> Sinclair is a privately owned company. I'm sure there have
> been many private owners of radio or television stations who
> have broadcast their own commentary. If Sinclair were
> publicly owned, you could bring some shareholder derivative
> action if the management acted not in the company's best
> interests.
Sinclair is a publicly traded corporation. Their stock price dropped after the Stolen Honor incident and stockholders were quite vocal about it. In fact, since the FCC has elected to ignore its responsibilites to regulate the public airwaves beyond wardrobe malfunctions, Howard Stern, and how to reduce diversity of ownership, it seems those shareholders are the -only- moderating force at work when it comes to Sinclair.
I don't personally care if a station owner airs a commentary or editorial. I recall a lot of stations doing that before news was seen as a profit-making enterprise. But I do care when orders from on high come down from Baltimore ordering newsroom employees -NOT- to do what every other station has done in the past by labeling it as such, even to the point of demanding station personnel mail air tapes back to Sinclair corporate to prove to them you aren't being honest with the viewers.
