Sleaze and smear at Sinclair
David Smith and Carlton Sherwood, the two men behind the "Stolen Honor" fiasco, are a perfect match.
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By Eric Boehlert
Oct. 22, 2004 | Friday night brings to a conclusion the fiercest media battle of the presidential campaign, when 40 of the Sinclair Broadcast Group's 62 stations nationwide air a special program about the media and Vietnam War POWs. The show is likely to include generous portions of an anti-Kerry attack film, "Stolen Honor," that Sinclair executives had originally intended to air in its entirety just days before the election. In the face of lawsuits by stockholders, loss of advertising, questions about its abuse of the public airwaves and a falling stock price, however, Sinclair quickly cobbled together a revised program.
The controversy has thrust into the spotlight two men who both suffered dramatic, if long ago, professional blemishes that have suddenly become relevant. Their past behavior confirms their critics' worst suspicions -- that Sinclair executives manipulate the company's broadcast properties for their own gain, contrary to standard corporate practice, and that "Stolen Honor" is a misleading hit piece. The two men, who play prominent roles in Sinclair's Friday night telecast, are a conservative broadcaster who has not shied away from exploiting his television properties to serve his personal needs, and a television journalist with a right-wing agenda who once famously aired explosive allegations in a Vietnam veteran-related exposé that was later found to be completely false.
The first is David Smith, chairman and CEO of Sinclair. After being arrested with a prostitute during a sting in Baltimore, Md., in 1996, Smith, as part of his plea agreement, ordered his newsroom employees to produce a series of reports on a local drug counseling program, which counted toward Smith's court-ordered community service. "I really hated the way he handled our newsroom and what he expected his reporters to do after his arrest," LuAnne Canipe, a reporter who worked on air at Sinclair's flagship station, WBFF in Baltimore, from 1994 to 1998, told Salon.
The second is Carlton Sherwood, the producer of "Stolen Honor." Sherwood calls Sen. John Kerry a traitor for opposing the Vietnam War and concedes he never asked to interview Kerry for the documentary he made about him. This incident is not out of character for Sherwood, who has a history of erroneous reporting. In 1983, Sherwood leveled charges against the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. In a four-part series for a local Washington TV station, Sherwood suggested that the veterans responsible for creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall were misspending -- if not stealing -- donated money. One year later, when Sherwood's charges proved to be baseless, his former television station employer was forced to air an extraordinary retraction and donate $50,000 to the fund in order to fend off a lawsuit. "It was a hit piece," Bob Doubek, who served as project director for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, told Salon. "All of Sherwood's stuff was conjecture, smoke and mirrors."
Sinclair's unprecedented broadcast decision regarding "Stolen Honor," coming at the climax of one of the most heated presidential campaigns in modern times, and seen by many observers as blatantly unfair, ignited an equally unprecedented revolt. There have been widespread calls for advertising boycotts, formal complaints to the Federal Election Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, a shareholder lawsuit, a libel lawsuit and the threat of an insider-trading lawsuit.
On Tuesday, Sinclair moved to stop the bleeding, at least on Wall Street, by announcing that its stations would not air "Stolen Honor" in its entirety during prime time, but would instead run a hastily produced one-hour news special, "A POW Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media," which itself will feature portions of "Stolen Honor." Sherwood's film presents the emotional accounts of former POWs, a number of them not identified as active in Republican politics, who argue that Kerry's antiwar activities, not President Nixon's policies, helped extend the war and caused the men to be held captive for longer than they would have been otherwise.
At midweek Sinclair officials signaled that even they were unsure what the program would look like, so it's impossible to predict what the show's final content will be. But given Sinclair's stated goals of the program -- to address "allegations of media bias by media organizations that ignore or filter legitimate news" -- along with Sinclair's obvious Republican sympathies, "A POW Story" appears to be another blunt instrument with which to bash Kerry.
For weeks Sinclair executives have been pressing Kerry to sit for an interview on its stations and explain his decision to protest the war. Yet President Bush has never been urged to appear on Sinclair stations to defend his service, or lack of it, in the Texas Air National Guard.
That sort of implied quid pro quo (appear on our stations or else) is "insulting to the news-gathering process," says journalist Paul Alexander, who's also the director of this year's "Brothers in Arms," a widely acclaimed documentary about Kerry's Vietnam experience. "That's not how you gather news; that's how you blackmail people." But news gathering was never the point, according to former Sinclair reporter LuAnne Canipe. "David Smith doesn't care abut journalism," she says.
That became clear to her, Canipe says, during the summer of 1996, when Smith was arrested in Baltimore for picking up a prostitute who performed what police called an "unnatural and perverted sex act" on him as he drove on the highway in a company-owned Mercedes. Smith was convicted of a misdemeanor sex offense.
"It was all very humiliating as a journalist," says Canipe. "The next day we went out in a station vehicle and we stopped at a light. And a truck driver sees the station logo on the side of the car and starts making a sex gesture to us." |
