Anniston Star: Abusing the Airwaves (Sinclair)

[reprehensor]

Abusing the airwaves

A thinly veiled political stunt by the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns Birmingham television station WTTO/Channel 21, suggests that the company is carrying on in the tradition of Richard Nixon’s character assassins. Sinclair plans to force all 62 of the stations it owns to air “Stolen Honor,” a smear about John Kerry’s Vietnam record, in the weeks before the presidential election.

Years before Kerry was a thorn in the side of the current “war president,” he presented a danger to President Nixon, mired deep into Vietnam. In 1971, Kerry was a clean-cut, well-spoken war hero speaking out against the war. He posed a very real problem for an administration waging a PR battle that pitted, in their version, the good Americans against the long-haired radical peaceniks, who were really cowards.

Nixon and his aides worked to dismiss Kerry as “politically ambitious,” a “complete opportunist,” and “sort of a phony” looking to “run America down.”

“Give it to him, give it to him,” Nixon said to one surrogate charged with attacking the 27-year-old.

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[realFedUp]

1. From the LA Times today - A Tone-Deaf Broadcaster

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-fcc15oct15,1,5064955.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials

EDITORIAL
A Tone-Deaf Broadcaster

October 15, 2004

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Sinclair Broadcast Group, an owner of TV stations across the country and an advocate of lifting current federal limits on media ownership, is interrupting regularly scheduled programming on its stations nationwide next week to force them to air a documentary opposing John F. Kerry. If opponents of further media concentration had floated this as a hypothetical scenario to advance their cause, they would have been laughingly dismissed.

But with breathtaking political tone-deafness, Sinclair has come to their rescue. There is a strong case for revising the decades-old media ownership rules, but thanks to Sinclair, the case will be a tougher sell. It's no wonder investors rushed to sell shares in the ineptly managed media company after The Times first reported Sinclair's plans to compel most of its 62 stations to air "Stolen Honor." The 42-minute film claims, according to its producer, that Kerry's "lies, false testimony and distortions" about the Vietnam War encouraged the North Vietnamese to torture U.S. prisoners.

After The Times reported Saturday that Sinclair would air the show as a news broadcast next week, 17 Democratic senators asked Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael K. Powell to investigate whether "current law and regulation" permitted broadcasters to air such "blatantly partisan" programming. They do, Powell responded Thursday. The federal Fairness Doctrine, which once demanded more or less equal broadcast time for differing political views, is pretty much dead at the hands of federal courts.

Viewers may recall that Sinclair, six months ago, barred its ABC affiliates from airing an episode of ABC's "Nightline" in which anchor Ted Koppel read the names of soldiers killed in Iraq. Koppel's roll call, Sinclair said, was "a political statement disguised as news content." Now, it claims just the opposite for "Stolen Honor."

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[reprehensor]

2. But, some editors...

Don't like to be bothered!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=137x427