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| On February 16, 2005, Sinclair
Broadcast Group (SBG), including KGAN, attacked an Iowa Citian for
no apparent reason other than to discredit a dissenting voice. Using
its stations, it broadcasted its attack on The
Point, a 1-2 minute interruption of each station's daily
local news program. During The Point, SBG Vice President Mark Hyman
presents his take on the world, which, as far as we can tell, is
focused on SBG's business-political agenda. Hyman often uses lofty
language, for example, by expressing devotion to the First Amendment
or the need for diverse views. However, to marry Sinclair's interests
with such talk, Hyman uses selected facts, deceptive statements,
and judgmental conclusions in characterizing opposing voices. Given
the events described below, we cannot believe that his interest
in free speech goes beyond Sinclair's desire to keep its 62-station
bullhorn. |
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Sinclair
often uses The Point to attack perceived threats. For example,
from January to March of 2005, Hyman made several swipes at Senator
John McCain, possibly because he had stated that Sinclair's
censorship of airing the names of fallen U.S. soldiers was "deeply
offensive" and "unpatriotic". Or perhaps Sinclair
is concerned about McCain's influence on the Senate Commerce Commission,
which oversees the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Our
review of Hyman's Sermons on The Point over that three-month period
revealed negative or snide remarks about McCain, or his campaign-reform
legislation, on five editions of The Point.
Another whipping
boy is a favorite of reactionary conservatives: the good ol' dreaded
American Civil Liberties Union. On The Point, Hyman has said that
its behavior is equivalent to "communist Chinese" and
that it "abhors individual religious freedom". In a
three-month (March-May 2005) period, Hyman criticized the ACLU
on seven occasions, again, using time on local news broadcasts
to do so. Hyman evidently values repetition as a means of making
a point, or perhaps as a means of trying to making it stick.
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| On February 16, 2005, Sinclair
went after Ted Remington, a University of Iowa adjunct professor
of rhetoric. Unlike John McCain or John Kerry, Remington was not
a political figure or among the power elite. However, he did have
the temerity to run a weblog called The
Counterpoint, a critique of the falsehoods and distortions
of The Point. In his attack, Hyman falsely accused Remington of
teaching his students tolerance of academic plagiarism. Not only
did Hyman fabricate that charge, but he used the tried-and-true
technique of guilt by association. In smearing Professor Remington,
Hyman sandwiched his charge against him among other cases of presumed
academic malfeasance, including the reckless remarks of Colorado's
Ward Churchill. |
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So
much for Hyman... What's the truth?
In reality,
Ted Remington had nothing to do with the university's plagiarism
policy. However, Mr. Hyman himself was guilty of a twisted
sort of plagiarism: not only did he fail to disclose the real
authors of the policy, but he attributed it to Remington, apparently
to serve Sinclair's base desire to squash dissent. The course
material that contained the plagiarism policy that so upset Hyman
did have four other instructors' names on it, a
little detail Hyman failed to tell the viewing public. One can
only conclude that Sinclair smeared Remington because it saw him
as threat to their operation; why else would these two critical
bits of truth be kept from the viewers? And one last thought about
plagiarism and good reporting: It appears to us that Mr. Hyman
just went surfing and happened upon a University of Iowa website
that contained Remington's name, photo, and a lame excuse to brand
him (the plagiarism policy). Mr. Hyman, doesn't ethical journalism
require checking one's sources, rather than surfing around and
fabricating data tar someone with a false charge and then hoping
that no one notices?
So much for
concern for diverse viewpoints, the First Amendment, or high journalistic
standards -- ironically, topics that Hyman frequently lectures
about on his Pointy platform.
The
details are telling
A little
more background information (relayed to IBLTV by Dr. Remington)
is helpful in trying to understand Sinclair's practices. About
two weeks prior to the broadcast, Sinclair's legal counsel, Barry
Faber, contacted Remington, and asked him who he was and about
his motivation in running his weblog. He also mentioned that several
people at Sinclair had been reading his weblog posts, including
Sinclair CEO David Smith. During this exchange, Faber dangled
the possibility of establishing some kind of issues / debate forum
in which Sinclair and Remington could voice differing views. This
forum, Faber suggested, could be on the internet or possibly even
on the air.
However,
nothing ever came of those positive sounding proposals. Instead,
two weeks later (and a few days after Remington was interviewed
on Air America, the liberal radio program), Hyman, Sinclair, and
KGAN broadcasted their smear.
It
gets worse
Remington
e-mailed Hyman and SBG's legal counsel about the falseness of
their broadcast. While he did not receive a prompt response, a
few days later, Sinclair did respond, by
removing the video clip and the written transcript of that episode
from their website. It seemed like covering one's tracks,
as the video clips and transcripts on either side of that date
remained on the the News
Central website, as MediaMatters.org has reported. While removal
of the evidence was relatively swift, an on-air apology or explanation
for this attack was not. A
partial retraction - that Remington didn't author the plagiarism
policy after all - was aired two and a half weeks after the attack,
on the Saturday local news, when viewership is traditionally low.
Importantly, viewers were never told why Remington was attacked
in the first place, nor that Sinclair had communicated with him
prior to the attack. While Hyman likes to lecture about the
ethical failures of print journalists, he was silent on his own
misuse of the public's airwaves.
Furthermore,
no one from KGAN contacted Remington before or after the smear.
Nor did they ever offer him -- or anyone else, for that matter
-- time on their broadcast to present a view different than that
provided by Hyman's nightly lecture.
This saga
is a sad commentary on the state of local broadcast news in our
brave new world of mass ownership of the means of public communication.
It also shows the predictable results of the loss of the FCC's
Fairness Doctrine, which stipulated that licensees using the
public's airwaves had to provide equal time for opposing views.
This long-standing FCC rule would have seemed to have a secure
place, given the need for a well-informed public in a participatory
democracy. However, it was vetoed by Ronald Reagan in 1987. The
legacy of that veto -- the public airwaves becoming the soapbox
of an elite rich -- is only serving to fuel the trends toward
distrust of the media and further alienate us from one another.
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Iowans for better local TV
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