Fired Sinclair Reporter Says His Criticism Not New
Jon Leiberman, the Sinclair reporter who was fired for speaking out against his employer’s plan to air the anti-Kerry documentary, said he has complained before to his bosses about the companies biased TV news reporting.

“It was the daily struggle to get fair news on the air,” he said. “I’ve been raising red flags for months. I didn’t just fly off the handle. … This is an agonizing process.”

… By last winter, Leiberman said he was privately complaining to his bosses about the blurring of the line between the company’s news stories and the conservative, pro-Bush editorials of Mark Hyman. It came to a head when Hyman and Leiberman were sent to Iraq in February to find positive developments missed by the rest of the mainstream media, which Sinclair executives said were focusing too narrowly on the unstable conditions there.

“Our mission really is to tell stories we think local news viewers aren’t getting throughout the country,” Leiberman told The Sun at the time.

Cameramen accompanied Leiberman, who was to report stories, and Hyman, whose assignment was to tape editorials about conditions in Iraq under the U.S.-led occupation. But the difference between the two became tough to discern, Leiberman said. “The commentaries were being presented as news,” he said.

In separate interviews, two former Sinclair producers – Lisa Modarelli and Dana Hackley – gave similar accounts of Leiberman’s struggles with his news bosses, in Iraq and back at home.

“Mark Hyman had his own agenda, which was to [produce] stories that he envisioned to be commentaries but that the average viewer would see as news,”said Hackley, who has since left the company for a job at a Pittsburgh university.

By late spring, Leiberman was thoroughly disillusioned. (He provided copies of e-mailed correspondence this week to The Sun to bolster his account.) In early May, he forwarded to DeFeo, the news vice president, a copy of a complaint from a viewer who said that the company’s newscast was biased. Leiberman added a note saying he agreed.

Hackley said Hyman and Smith routinely gave story ideas to news executives, who usually sought quick reaction by reporters.

On June 10, Leiberman asked to be released from his contract with Sinclair. In an e-mail to DeFeo, Leiberman wrote: “I am miserable in this position. We don’t have the resources to cover the news, and the resources we are given are always driven toward conservative agenda stories. We are not balanced and I have a problem with it.”

DeFeo responded soothingly, according to the correspondence given to The Sun: “I like having you on board with me as we build this. We will, and have, made some mistakes in this complex process.”

Leiberman complained to DeFeo and Carl Gottlieb, managing editor of Sinclair’s corporate news division, about a series of story selections. They were skewed toward stories that would make Kerry look bad, he argued. Many of them were defensible on their own terms, Leiberman said. But at a time when the bureau was typically producing one story a night, story selection was everything.

In response to one such lament, Gottlieb replied by e-mail, “Jon, all news is agenda driven.”

“All news is agenda driven.” Sad to say, Gottlieb is right. The agenda may be conservative or liberal politics. Or it may be audience ratings- or ad dollars-driven. But there’s usually an agenda that has nothing to do with honest journalism.

Meanwhile, Sinclair says it has decided not air the anti-Kerry film, “saying it would air only portions of the movie in an hour-long special scheduled for Friday.”

The company says it never planned to air the whole documentary. Atrios refers us to a citation that suggests that’s not true, as if we needed one. But none of the reports I’ve read have made clear why what they plan to air is substantively different or potentially less damaging to Kerry has the full documentary would have been. But clearly, the blogosphere has won another big one. The lesson: Hit them in their pocketbook.

Sinclair’s stock has dropped more than 15 percent since the controversy erupted 10 days ago. Alan G. Hevesi, the Democratic comptroller of New York whose state pension fund holds 257,000 shares of Sinclair, questioned in a letter to the company yesterday whether airing the movie would further depress the shares.

The Sinclair announcement came hours after Deborah Rappaport, a major Democratic donor with her husband, Andy, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, said they had offered to buy one hour on Sinclair stations. This would finance a 42-minute version of a pro-Kerry documentary, “Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry,” by George Butler. Rappaport said she was “deeply, deeply outraged” by Sinclair’s action and was offering $1 million more than the company’s usual ad rate in response.

Adding to the pressure on Sinclair, a group of institutional investors alleged yesterday that Smith’s three brothers, who serve on the company board, sold millions of dollars in Sinclair shares late last year just before the stock began its decline. Prominent shareholder lawyer William S. Lerach said the family would face a lawsuit unless the company is repaid.

Lerach, who has led investor lawsuits against Enron Corp., Time Warner Inc. and other corporations, is a noted Democratic fundraiser. But he said his involvement is not political, spurred instead by institutional investors who have watched Sinclair’s stock slide from a high of $15 per share in late December to its close of $6.26 yesterday.

Lerach noted that Frederick, Robert and Duncan Smith sold about 1.4 million shares of stock for almost $19 million as the stock was peaking at the turn of the year. The attorney, whose clients include a New York pension fund for health care workers, said the plan to air “Stolen Honor” has further hurt the company by driving down the stock price. He said Sinclair executives “should be focusing on creating shareholder value — not pressing a controversial personal political agenda at shareholders’ expense.”

I’m probably the only blogger who hasn’t yet directed his readers to the Jon Stewart visit with “Crossfire.” But in case you haven’t seen it, take a look.

Stewart calls Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala “partisan hacks.”

I love Stewart. He’s brilliantly put himself in the position of deflecting all criticism by saying “I’m a dancing monkey,” so you can’t compare what he does with real journalism. But the truth is he’s impacting the debate as much as any journalist writing today.

Nawwww.

Watch Sinclair Broadcasting’s stock tumble.

Update: One journalist with balls may lose his job over Sinclair’s agenda.

Kurtz was asked a number of times during his online chat today about his column this morning. (See earlier post.) He ignored my question asking his opinion. But in the end, he says that reporting that candidates lie is just too hard for working scribes.

It’s much harder to crawl out on a limb and say, I have studied what the two campaigns have said on issue X and here is my factual analysis of where the truth lies. You take a lot of heat when you do that, as opposed to “President Bush and Senator Kerry traded charges today on whether the senator is soft on terrorism…” It also happens to be good journalism to try to untangle the competing claims and counterclaims.

There’s already a problem.

The Ailes network is firing the producer who sued O’Reilly for sexual harassment.

Looks like the press is catching up with me and others who have long contended (and as recently as two weeks ago) that fair, objective and balanced doesn’t mean that the press should weigh each article or general coverage by whether it equally criticizes or congratulates candidates for their representations on the stump.

In today’s Washington Post column Howard Kurtz cites what could be a hopeful trend.

In articles, columns and one internal ABC News memo, some journalists have argued that the president has engaged in far more serious distortions than John Kerry has, and that media outlets should blow the whistle on these falsehoods.

“Your instinct is that if we say bad things about one side you have to say bad things about the other side,” says Adam Nagourney, the New York Times’s chief political reporter. “You want to give equal scrutiny to both sides, but I don’t think you should impose a false equivalence that doesn’t exist.”

…At issue is how far reporters should go in analyzing the candidates’ attacks and ads, especially if one side is using a howitzer and the other a popgun. Mark Halperin, ABC’s political director, fueled the debate with a memo that leaked to the Drudge Report.

“Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and [makes] mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win,” Halperin wrote. While both sides should be held accountable, “that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable when the facts don’t warrant that.” Complaints by the Bush camp, Halperin said, are “all part of their efforts to get away with as much as possible with the stepped-up, renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.”

The skipped over graph in the preceding citation reveals the reason truly objective reporting is so hard to come by.

The Bush team, which issued a release slamming a recent Nagourney story, is pushing back. “The Bush campaign should be able to make an argument without having it reflexively dismissed as distorted or inaccurate by the biggest papers in the country,” says spokesman Steve Schmidt.

Conservatives for decades have been “pushing back.” It’s what has led many enterprising reporters to state what now is to many the obvious. There is a conservative bias in the press. It’s not just Fox News. That’s so blatant anyone can see it. It is the subconscious impact the conservatives have had on the mainstream press, pushing reporters and editors to see balance where there is none. The press is fearful that true fairness would mean retaliation by a conservative administration and a lack of access to sources, which it sees as a competitive disadvantage. Finally, some thoughtful journalists are pushing back.

The key question is one of magnitude. Kerry had been saying the war in Iraq has cost $200 billion; that is the current estimate, but the price tag so far is $120 billion. (Kerry adjusted his answer in the final debate.) Bush keeps charging that Kerry is pushing a “government-run” health care plan, even though nearly all analysts and journalists have concluded that it builds on the existing system of private insurance. That would seem a more fundamental misrepresentation. (Bush repeated the charge in the Arizona debate, and when Kerry cited network reports challenging the claim, the president questioned whether “it’s credible to quote leading news organizations.”)

Charges are often technically true but still misleading. One Bush ad said Kerry supported a 50-cent gas tax under which “the average family would pay $657 more a year.” Kerry briefly expressed support for such a tax in 1994 but changed his mind and never introduced or voted for such a bill.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank was the lead writer on a May 31 story (to which this reporter made a minor contribution) that recited a litany of Bush charges, saying they “were all tough, serious — and wrong, or at least highly misleading.”

The Oct. 8 Times piece by Nagourney and Richard Stevenson attributed to “several analysts” the idea that “Mr. Bush pushed the limits of subjective interpretation and offered exaggerated or what some Democrats said were distorted accounts of Mr. Kerry’s positions on health care, tax cuts, the Iraq war and foreign policy.”

Says Nagourney: “People who work for the larger papers and networks are more able to withstand attacks and have an added obligation to be out front on this.”

Paul Krugman, the liberal Times columnist, writes that while Kerry might use “loose language,” Bush’s statements are “fundamentally dishonest. . . . Journalists who play it safe by spending equal time exposing his lies and parsing Mr. Kerry’s choice of words are betraying their readers.”

If we’re betrayed, we need to speak up. The first chance is at noon today when Howard Kurtz has his weekly online chat. Let’s try to get him to come clean on his view, which is impossible to discern in the column, perhaps because he’s often guilty of the forced balance Nagourney and others have challenged.

Update: Kevin Drum cites the Post’s ombudsman article arguing the same point.

Some say Virginia is not a lost cause but winnable. A new site, November Surprise, says the latest Zogby poll has Bush leading by just over two points in the Old Dominion, within the 3% MOE. Check out the site to see what you can do to help make Virginny the “November surprise.”

…the scumbag, gets hit with a sexual harassment suit.