REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Sinclair and Watergate
"Stolen Honor" and stolen press freedom.
Sinclair Broadcast Group's decision this week not to air "Stolen Honor," a documentary on John Kerry's post-Vietnam antiwar activities, is being cheered by liberals as a victory for truth, honor and the Democratic Party. But we wonder if the liberals in the media might not eventually rue the day, much as the New York Times now rues the special prosecutor it helped to launch in the Joe Wilson-Valerie Plame case.
Sinclair bent under enormous political pressure, but notably a kind we haven't seen wielded before to silence the media. We aren't referring to the raft of Democratic complaints filed with official agencies. There's nothing unusual there. A call for an advertising boycott came next--again, not pleasant, but not unheard of in this business.
The next step was something new: a double team by trial lawyers and government officials threatening shareholder suits. Out of the gate first was William Lerach, a Democratic funder who announced plans this week to sue Sinclair because by running the documentary it was creating controversy that cost it advertising revenue. The king of strike suits told the San Diego Union-Tribune: "At a time when the company is experiencing troubles, the board and officers should be focused on creating shareholder value--not pressing [a] controversial personal political agenda at shareholders' expense."
Media Matters, a liberal media agitprop outfit, announced it was underwriting another shareholder suit and demanded that Sinclair provide equal time to those with opposing views. (It apparently escaped their attention that the Kerry campaign had declined Sinclair's invitation to respond on air and that the federal "equal time" requirement vanished along with the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s.)
But the real kicker came when New York State's Democratic Comptroller, Alan Hevesi, also decided to assail Sinclair. Mr. Hevesi wrote a letter to Sinclair in his capacity as trustee of the state pension fund, which owns 265,000 shares in the company.
"Some critics suggest that Sinclair management is more interested in advancing its partisan political views than in protecting shareholder value," he writes. "They say Sinclair's partisan agenda also risks alienating viewers, advertisers and regulators." In other circumstances, this is known as an offer you can't refuse: Pull the show or else.
What's astonishing here is that this legal-political double team has gone on with barely a whimper of protest from the rest of the media. In fact, it is being celebrated as a defeat for all of those right-wing scoundrels who support President Bush. We understand that most of the press corps is liberal and desperately wants Mr. Kerry to win. Editors and producers may let that distort their coverage, but they usually aren't so blinded by partisanship that they can't see their own self-interest.
Now that this trial lawyer-government precedent has been set, who's to stop it if it next turns, as eventually it will, on the New York Times, or CBS? One of the most important protections that a free press has is independent corporate ownership, but what if the Nixon Administration had unleashed its lawyer friends and government pension funds on the Times Company when it was publishing the Pentagon Papers, or the Washington Post when it was digging into Watergate? If the standard now is that stirring controversy is a fraud against shareholders because it may cost ad revenue, a lot more media owners than Sinclair are going to become political targets.
