Wall Street JournalWall Street Journal OpEd page
Sinclair and Double Standards
October 13, 2004; Page A16
We haven't seen "Stolen Honor," the documentary on Senator John Kerry's post-Vietnam antiwar activities that's causing such a brouhaha in advance of its scheduled airing later this month. Sinclair Broadcast Group doesn't own a station in our metro New York City market, though we're now tempted to hop on a plane to Buffalo or St. Louis to check out what all the fuss is about.
Of course, if Dianne Feinstein and 17 other Democratic Senators have their way, Buffalonians and St. Louisans won't get to see it either. The Senators have written a letter of protest to the Federal Communications Commission. "To allow a broadcasting company to air such a blatantly partisan attack in lieu of regular programming, and to classify that attack as 'news programming' as has been suggested, would violate the spirit, and we think the text, of current law and regulation," they write.
Meanwhile, Terry McAuliffe called the program "an illegal in-kind contribution" to the Bush campaign and said the Democratic National Committee is filing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. Over at the FCC, Democratic Commissioner Michael Copps interrupted his Columbus Day holiday to dub the broadcast "an abuse of the public trust." More ominously, Kerry adviser Chad Clanton told Fox News yesterday that "I think they (Sinclair) are going to regret doing this, and they better hope we don't win." Perhaps Mr. Clanton is auditioning for the H.R. Haldeman seat in the Nixon, er, Kerry White House.
Allow us to interrupt this programming with a commercial on the First Amendment. It wasn't the intention of the Founders to give elected officials veto power over press reports. That goes for Republicans too. We didn't like it any better when GOP Representative Joe Barton, outraged at Rathergate, last month considered convening a hearing on TV news operations.
The excuse for such broadcast regulation used to be that the public airwaves required "equal time." But this anti-democratic notion went away when the so-called Fairness Doctrine finally did in the 1980s. With all of the many media outlets that are now available, surely no one thinks Sinclair's special will brainwash voters who haven't been exposed to the alternative point of view. All those voters have to do is turn on CNN 24 hours a day, or the CBS Evening News whenever Dan Rather is letting anti-Bush Texas partisans leak him a story.
In any event, we fail to see a difference between Sinclair's anti-Kerry documentary and the cascade of newspaper editorials now endorsing the Senator. The Kerry campaign graciously sent us (and no doubt a few thousand other of its closest media friends) a batch this week, complete with Web links. The list included such leading big-city dailies as the Philadelphia Inquirer (which is planning 21 installments on its favored candidate), St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Oregonian, the Portland (Maine) Press Herald, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. These editorials all appeared over the weekend.
Previous Kerry endorsements have come from the Philadelphia Daily News, the Seattle Times, the Arizona Daily Star, the Detroit Free Press, the New London Day, and -- living up to its name -- the Lone Star Iconoclast of President Bush's hometown of Crawford, Texas. Other big city papers -- New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald -- haven't weighed in yet, but you can already guess where most will lean. (This newspaper has a long tradition of not endorsing candidates.)
We haven't done the math, but surely the combined impact of these "in-kind contributions" reaches millions of potential voters who aren't likely to read another editorial endorsing Mr. Bush. By contrast, Sinclair's 42-minute documentary is airing on the company's 62 stations, which reach 24% of U.S. households. The Kerry campaign declined Sinclair's invitation to the Senator to comment on the show.
None of "Stolen Honor's" critics appears to have actually seen the show, whose subtitle is "Wounds That Never Heal." It is said to include interviews with former Vietnam POWs arguing that Senator Kerry's 1971 testimony to Congress prolonged their captivity. Whether or not one agrees with Sinclair vice president Mark Hyman's news judgment that this is an undercovered story, it is certainly the right of the news organization to broadcast it.
Meanwhile, Variety reports that Michael Moore is negotiating to air "Fahrenheit 9/11" on pay per view on Election Day eve. We look forward to reading the Senators' follow-up letter to the FCC on this abuse of the airwaves.
