More From the Propoganda Wars

From the front:

Not Necessarily the News: "“Propaganda always works better if it seems not to be propaganda—if it seems to be entertainment, or if it seems to be news,” says Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of culture and communication at New York University. “These people want to dominate the public sphere, but they don’t want us to know that.”

Lately, though, this balancing act has been getting harder to sustain. Especially since last year’s presidential campaign, the company’s efforts to inject partisan spin into its local “news” have become increasingly bold and increasingly obvious. In April 2004, the company forbade all of its ABC stations to air a segment of Nightline in which Ted Koppel read the names of American casualties in Iraq, which Sinclair’s management considered “motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States.” Six months later, Sinclair executives launched a political effort of their own, instructing all their news stations to broadcast a documentary on John Kerry called Stolen Honor, which accused the candidate of treason during the Vietnam War. In the buzz that followed, Sinclair’s vice president of corporate relations, Mark Hyman, stoked the fire even further by announcing that any network that refused to air the anti-Kerry documentary were “acting like Holocaust deniers” and that even if the documentary was a gift to Bush, the effect was balanced by the existence of suicide bombers in the Middle East, since after all, “Every car bomb in Iraq would be considered an in-kind contribution to John Kerry.” Nearly three months later, the company was back in the hot seat, this time forced to admit that one of its most visible reporters, Armstrong Williams, had not only spent recent years landing exclusive interviews with men like Dick Cheney and Tom DeLay but was also getting paid handsomely by the Bush administration, having struck a deal with the White House to receive $240,000 in exchange for “favorable commentaries.” Yes, by the beginning of this year, Sinclair was getting hard to ignore."