Oct 09, 2004 Zoon Politikon

Network TV Smear Campaign Call-to-Arms

You may have heard that the Sinclair Broadcasting Group is ordering its member stations to show partisan programming in the final days before the election. The movie, “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal,” was made by Carlton Sherwood, who used to work for Tom Ridge, and then went on to work for the Bush Administration in the Dept. of Homeland Security’s media operations. As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo put it, “it’s a 90 minute Swift-Boat ad which Sinclair is ordering stations seen in a quarter of the nation’s households to show a week before the election.”

Sherwood was a respectable journalist once upon a time, there’s no doubt about that. He won a Pulitzer Prize back in the 1980s. However, after that he went to work for the Washington Times and ended up writing a supposedly exonerating book about Sun Myung Moon’s Reunification Church.

This is beyond low. As David Wade said (Reg. Required), “it’s beyond yellow journalism; it’s a smear bankrolled by Republican money.”

Everyone should contact their local Sinclair Broadcasting Group station and demand that “Stolen Honor” is never displayed on network television, assuming it is still classified as legitimate news. The full list of Sinclair Broadcasting Group stations can be found on their website.