Rolling Stone-Beyond 'Fair and Balanced'-Sinclair Broadcasting

[LiviaOlivia]

Rolling Stone

Beyond 'Fair and Balanced'
Sinclair, the pro-Bush broadcaster, is waging war on the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys"

By ERIC KLINENBERG
Posted Feb 10, 2005



Last year, when conservative commentator Armstrong Williams took $240,000 in payoffs from the Bush administration to promote its education policies in the media, he needed to reach a national television audience to satisfy the terms of his lucrative deal. Fortunately for Williams, he was good friends with David Smith, the CEO of Sinclair Broadcast Group, the nation's largest owner of television stations.

Although Smith says he didn't know Williams was on the take, he liked the pundit's pro-Bush views and was eager to hand him plum assignments at Sinclair. While on the Bush payroll, Williams did an interview for Sinclair with then Education Secretary Rod Paige, the man responsible for funneling him taxpayer money to secure such prime-time exposure. He also interviewed Majority Whip Tom DeLay, and even got an hour on camera with Vice President Dick Cheney, who rarely speaks to the media. "Sinclair brought me stuff that I did not have -- real numbers, where you can get the speaker of the house or the VP," Williams tells ROLLING STONE. "On Sinclair, I was talking to millions of viewers a night."

~snip~

At Sinclair, the top of the food chain is David Smith. An imposing man with a pink complexion and a confrontational manner, Smith comes across like an overgrown frat boy who suddenly struck it rich. His father, Julian Sinclair Smith, launched the family's first television station in 1971, and in the last decade, David and his three brothers have expanded the operation into a broadcast empire with access to four in one American households. During a daylong tour of Sinclair's headquarters, on the outskirts of Baltimore, Smith repeatedly boasts about his wealth ("I bet you wish you were my son," he tells me. "It would put you in a different financial bracket") and proudly shows off his travel photographs, which are mounted and displayed in the hallways of Sinclair's five-story office building. He makes no secret of his support for Bush and describes Sinclair as one of the only bastions of objectivity in American journalism.

~snip~

Smith had some experience in the media when he took over the company from his father -- but it wasn't the kind of work most conservatives would appreciate. In the 1970s, he was a partner in a business called Cine Processors, which made bootleg copies of porn films in the basement of a building owned by another of his father's companies, the Commercial Radio Institute. "We had the film-processing lab in operation for, like, a year," recalls David Williams, Smith's partner at Cine. "The first film we copied was Deep Throat, which had just opened in New York and was not available anywhere else." According to Williams, Cine got involved with the mob and was busted by the police. "How David got control of the family company after that, I don't know," he says. "He was just a big egotist. He wanted attention."

~snip~

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/6959139?pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single7&rnd=1108067412151&has-player=true

[EC]

1. Good ole Rolling Stone, back to their roots...

now if we can get Larry Flint back in the foray and some of the other old exposers, we may have a chance...

[Melodybe]

2. Yay Rolling Stone, out the bastards!

[sarcasmo]

3. As a proud subscriber to RS they had a great article about Social Security.

Paul Krugman had a great article called The Fake Crisis. The funniest thing was the photo it showed Chimpy at a roulette table with old people kids and the middle age watching him raking in the cash. IMO Rolling Stone kicks ASS.