Democrats Attack Plan for Anti-Kerry Broadcast

As Democrats mounted a multipronged attack on a conservative-leaning broadcast chain’s plans to air an anti-John F. Kerry film, “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal,” across a large swath of the country right before the election, much is riding on whether filmmaker Carlton Sherwood is a political propagandist or just a journalist with an untold story.

Although Democrats call Sherwood’s 42-minute film a blatantly partisan attack ad, Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. has ordered most of its 62 stations to showcase the film next week, just days before the Nov. 2 election. Many of the stations, which serve nearly one-fourth of the nation’s homes with TV, are in swing states, including Ohio and Florida.

Sherwood’s film shares several sources with the anti-Kerry campaign of the Swift Boat Vets and POWs for Truth, a group of Vietnam veterans who have accused the Democratic nominee of distorting his war record for political purposes. And Sherwood worked for nearly eight years for former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, now secretary of Homeland Security for the Bush administration.

In a phone interview Monday, Sherwood said he’s a political independent who’s just happy to get the story out. “I did this as a journalist, for all the purest reasons. There was no political money and I did not engage anyone in the campaign. This is as clean as it gets.”

In Sherwood’s film, released in early September on the Internet, former Vietnam prisoners of war allege that Kerry’s antiwar activities after he returned home as a decorated naval veteran prolonged their own ordeal for two years by boosting the morale of their captors.

A Vietnam veteran himself, Sherwood, a Harrisburg, Pa.-based former journalist for outlets including the conservative Washington Times, said he made the one-sided film to give voice to the veterans and didn’t ask Kerry for comment because “he’s had 33 years of all the press coverage he’s wanted.”

Moreover, he said, “I’ve never done political reporting, never contributed to a political campaign, never worked for a campaign. I’m a registered independent.” He said the $220,000 film was financed by Pennsylvania veterans.

Democrats were fighting back on several fronts. Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe said Sinclair, whose executives have given generously to the GOP, had refused to air a DNC ad criticizing President Bush and asserted that the company’s news is “notoriously anti-Kerry in its content.” He added that Sherwood’s film was being represented by the public relations firm of Shirley & Bannister, whose clients include the Republican National Committee.

The DNC said it would file a complaint today with the Federal Election Commission, charging Sinclair with making an illegal in-kind campaign contribution by running the film.

Meanwhile, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and 17 other Democratic senators, including Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, signed a letter urging the Federal Communications Commission to investigate whether Sinclair’s plan to air the film would be an improper use of public airwaves.

“To allow a broadcasting company to air such a blatantly partisan attack in lieu of regular programming, and to classify that attack as ‘news programming’ as has been suggested, would violate the spirit, and we think the text, of current law and regulation,” the senators wrote in a letter to FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell.

Sinclair plans to run “Stolen Honor” as news programming, which is exempted under campaign finance law. But DNC legal counsel Joe Sandler argued in a conference call with reporters that the film was not made by a documentary filmmaker and Sinclair doesn’t normally air such programming, so it doesn’t qualify for the exemption.

The FCC was closed for the Columbus Day holiday but Commissioner Michael J. Copps released a statement calling the broadcast “an abuse of the public trust. And it is proof positive of media consolidation run amok when one owner can use the public airwaves to blanket the country with its political ideology -- whether liberal or conservative.”

But Andrew Schwartzman, a public interest lawyer who runs the Media Access Project, said the Sinclair broadcast was unlikely to violate major tenets of communications law.

“It never runs afoul of communications law to carry a program,” he said. “What’s wrong is if they run a program determinedly one-sided and they don’t give the other guy a fair shake.” Schwartzman said the FCC’s equal time provisions wouldn’t apply because they are meant to give each candidate equal appearances on a station, not allow a rebuttal to a negative appearance (although Sinclair has offered Kerry a chance to appear).

“What this really underscores is that no one company should be allowed to program 62 television stations,” he said. “This administration has significantly loosened the media consolidation rules and Sinclair, having benefited from this, is now returning the favor.”

Executives at Sinclair didn’t return calls. The company posted a statement on its website saying, “The program has not been videotaped and the exact format of this unscripted event has not been finalized. Characterizations regarding the content are premature and are based on ill-informed sources.”

Mark Hyman, Sinclair’s vice president of corporate relations and a conservative commentator for its newscast, told Associated Press that the show would contain some or all of the film and a panel discussion.

Addressing the DNC’s complaint, he said: “Would they suggest that our reporting a car bomb in Iraq is an in-kind contribution to the Kerry campaign? Would they suggest that our reporting on job losses is an in-kind contribution to the Kerry campaign? It’s the news. It is what it is.”

Sherwood said he first met executives of Maryland-based Sinclair several weeks ago when they called and asked him to screen the film. They told him last week that they had decided to air it, starting Oct. 21. He said he gave them the rights for free.

At least two of the 17 former POWs who are listed on the film’s website as interview subjects have ties to the Bush administration and have been involved in the Swift Boat Vets and POWs for Truth. The two are Kenneth W. Cordier and Paul Galanti, who were both appointed by the Bush administration to serve on the Department of Veterans Affairs’ 12-member Former POW Advisory Committee. Cordier was also a vice chair for the 2004 Bush presidential campaign’s Veterans and Retired Military, but resigned that post after his tie to the campaign surfaced in the uproar over the Swift boat ads.

Both men had appeared in a Swift Boat Vets and POWs for Truth television ad attacking Kerry in early September. Galanti said Kerry’s antiwar statements were used by North Vietnamese “to demoralize us” and Cordier asked: “How could we support him now when he betrayed us in the past?”

Spokesmen for the Swift boat veterans said they had nothing to do with the making of Sherwood’s film but that they formally linked up with the POWs quoted in it after “Stolen Honor” was released in September.

Sherwood, a former journalist with Gannett News Service and CNN, and author of “Inquisition: The Persecution and Prosecution of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon,” went to work for Ridge, whom he described as a “personal friend,” in 1995.

He served as Pennsylvania’s director of Commonwealth media services, overseeing such things as the emergency broadcast system. When he left almost eight years later, he joined WVC3 Group, a Reston, Va.-based military and domestic security consulting firm with extensive government contacts.

Until June, when he took a leave of absence to work on the film, Sherwood was executive vice president there.

The firm’s website describes a wide range of activities from counter-terrorism work for “the Pentagon and the CIA” to aiding the Department of Homeland Security in devising a website to be used by “first responders” such as firefighters, police and emergency officials.

Sherwood said he had no financial interest in WVC3.