A Tone-Deaf Broadcaster

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Sinclair Broadcast Group, an owner of TV stations across the country and an advocate of lifting current federal limits on media ownership, is interrupting regularly scheduled programming on its stations nationwide next week to force them to air a documentary opposing John F. Kerry. If opponents of further media concentration had floated this as a hypothetical scenario to advance their cause, they would have been laughingly dismissed.

But with breathtaking political tone-deafness, Sinclair has come to their rescue. There is a strong case for revising the decades-old media ownership rules, but thanks to Sinclair, the case will be a tougher sell. It’s no wonder investors rushed to sell shares in the ineptly managed media company after The Times first reported Sinclair’s plans to compel most of its 62 stations to air “Stolen Honor.” The 42-minute film claims, according to its producer, that Kerry’s “lies, false testimony and distortions” about the Vietnam War encouraged the North Vietnamese to torture U.S. prisoners.

After The Times reported Saturday that Sinclair would air the show as a news broadcast next week, 17 Democratic senators asked Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael K. Powell to investigate whether “current law and regulation” permitted broadcasters to air such “blatantly partisan” programming. They do, Powell responded Thursday. The federal Fairness Doctrine, which once demanded more or less equal broadcast time for differing political views, is pretty much dead at the hands of federal courts.

Viewers may recall that Sinclair, six months ago, barred its ABC affiliates from airing an episode of ABC’s “Nightline” in which anchor Ted Koppel read the names of soldiers killed in Iraq. Koppel’s roll call, Sinclair said, was “a political statement disguised as news content.” Now, it claims just the opposite for “Stolen Honor.”

On Tuesday, some Democrats, recognizing that the FCC would probably be a dead end, filed a second appeal with the Federal Election Commission, arguing more narrowly that “Stolen Honor,” produced with financial aid from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and aired without commercials, is a political ad and an illegal corporate campaign contribution by Sinclair to President Bush. The fly in that ointment is that the FEC is toothless by design, dominated by the political parties. Sinclair says it has asked Kerry to answer the film’s charges after the broadcast, but that would be roughly equivalent to asking Bush to sit down to react to Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

Opponents of Sinclair are direly predicting that its anti-Kerry broadcast might throw the election to Bush, but that seems overblown even for those who relish big media conspiracy theories. If anything, the controversy is more likely to energize Kerry voters.