More tales from the "liberal media"

Remember the Sinclair Broadcasting Group? They own a number of television stations across the country. Sinclair gained notoriety earlier this year when Nightline aired a program reading off the names of the 721 US soldiers who'd been killed up to that point. Sinclair ordered its stations not to show that episode of Nightline, a decision blasted by Sen. John McCain as "deeply offensive" and "unpatriotic."

Sinclair, who donated the maximum allowed amount to the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, justified its decision by stating: Mr. Koppel and 'Nightline' are hiding behind this so-called tribute in an effort to highlight only one aspect of the war effort and in doing so to influence public opinion against the military action in Iraq.

Just to prove that the Nightline affair wasn't an isolated incident, now they're forcing their stations to air anti-John Kerry film days before the election, pre-empting regular network programming. Most appallingly, The Los Angeles Times says Sinclair had told them it planned to classify the program as news, where the [equal time] rules don't apply.

If a group of stations pre-empted regular network programming to air Fahrenheit 9/11 days before the election and classified it as news, you can be sure conservatives would be screaming bloody murder.


[Addendum: Just to clarify, I have no problem with Sinclair running the attack film. I object to them classifying it as news. And I wanted to point out the fact that if another station ran an overtly anti-Bush attack film, conservatives would be screaming bloody murder.

It's their stations and they can run what they want, just as this is my blog and I can write what I want. I think it would be better if ALL media outlets weren't so afraid of running controversial, "out of the box" work.]