On December 1,2004, a cheerful and charismatic meteorologist named Vytas Reid delivered bad news about the weather to television viewers in Buffalo, New York, who at least were expecting it. “We did get to see our snow last night,” Reid reported, lifting his eyebrows and sighing audibly so that the camera would capture the familiar resignation of a man who had been through countless northeastern blizzards and expected to see many more. The extreme climate only made the colorful topographic maps and WeatherRider FlyThru animation segments generated by Accu Weather’s Galileo Weather System all the more captivating. The veteran newsman invited his audience to join him at the radar screen. “We’ll take a look at what’s coming our way.” On the same day, at the same time, Reid also reported the weather for a television station in Flint, Michigan, where conditions were also bleak. “We got to see fifty-mile-per-hour gusts south of us,” Reid exclaimed, amazed at the area’s bad luck. The winds were calmer in Baltimore, Maryland, and Raleigh, North Carolina, however, where Reid was also the local meteorologist. He dutifully told viewers about the climate “we got to see” earlier in the day but warned that, alas, a cold snap was on its way.
Neither Reid nor any of the seven other meteorologists who worked in his newsroom that winter actually experienced the weather conditions that they reported to cities across the country from inside the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s glass-encased, modern headquarters in a Hunt Valley, Maryland, office park. Instead, they prepared for their segments by downloading climate data from the Accu Weather system, scripting banter to share with anchors, and studying geography and regional pronunciation from their library of atlases, as well as what the staff meteorologist James Wieland called “notebooks with little quirky things about each market we’re in.” Then they walked into one of Sinclair’s five one-person meteorology studios to stage a live, local forecast before robotically controlled cameras that they operated with a joystick. When they finished digitally recording a segment, the meteorologists sent it to the stations through a Telestream program called ClipMail. The technology was breathtakingly sophisticated. “If we had a bunch of twelve-year-old boys in here, we could run the whole station,” said Sinclair vice president and on-air personality Mark Hyman, my host and guide for the unforgettable day I spent inside the eerily lifeless, space-age news facility. “The price of a robotically controlled camera is basically the same as the price of a manned camera. But you’re not paying labor costs, health care, or payroll tax.” Wieland reminded us of another benefit. “A robot doesn’t call in sick.”
Wieland, a handsome man whose receding hairline and large forehead belied his age (early thirties), didn’t have much downtime either. “I’m doing three times the amount of forecasting here as I was before, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina,” he told me. “I do at least three cities daily, sometimes more if we’re short-staffed.” Whether reporting to Cincinnati, Rochester, Pittsburgh, or Las Vegas, Wieland looked and played the part of a local meteorologist. “Last year we sent our weather team to their specific markets to do community service,” he explained. “And a lot of people were surprised that we’re not even there.” “Viewers don’t care if James is in a studio in Oklahoma City, or College Park, or here,” added Hyman, who monitored all of my conversations in the building and jumped in whenever his staff strayed from the message management wanted them to convey. “There isn’t anyone in the U.S. who collects their own weather data, and so what we’re doing here is not so different.”
Hyman was being disingenuous. Journalists throughout the television industry considered Sinclair’s NewsCentral system revolutionary, and business managers viewed its ambitious directors, whose legal team had pushed the FCC’s local ownership limits to the breaking point, as fearsome renegades. In the mid-1990s Sinclair was a tiny and unknown speck on the media landscape. But by 2004 Sinclair had become infamous: not only did the family-run corporation own and operate more U.S. stations than any other company—sixty-two channels in forty markets, reaching at least 24 percent of American viewers1—it also pioneered the high-tech, top-down production system through which a staff of on-air personalities including Reid and Wieland recorded national and local “must carry” content (weather, sports, news, editorials, and specials) that was transmitted to each “online” station in its fleet. With NewsCentral, Hyman and his similarly opinionated boss, President and CEO David Smith, could dictate programming decisions that other broadcasters, including the networks, routinely delegate to local news directors, thereby reducing its local reporting staff to as few as fifteen or twenty people, bringing local operating costs down to depths that autonomous stations could never reach. When asked to defend the tight reins with which Sinclair controls its local channels, Hyman mimicked Clear Channel’s Randy Michaels. “Just like Sears tells all of its stores, ‘You will sell Craftsman tools.’ McDonald’s tells all of its restaurants, ‘You will have a sesame seed bun.’ That’s the business we’re in … To suggest that our TV stations are all simply stand-alone franchises and the local general manager can make any decision he wants about the program he carries is actually factually incorrect.”2
AT SINCLAIR, THE MOST IMPORTANT DECISIONS ABOUT LOCAL TELEVISION have always concerned politics. And for good reason: of all the options available to Americans, local television has long been and, despite recent struggles, remains to this day among the most popular and trusted source of news. Cable stations, television networks, newspapers, and radio may have dedicated followers, but none offer the warm, familiar local faces that are always there to explain the major happenings, issues, and events that, as meteorologist Reid put it, are “coming our way.” Sinclair tactfully established two station strongholds (or duopolies, whereby one company owns and operates two stations) in midsize cities, including Columbus, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Las Vegas, where it could influence swing-state voters but avoid national scrutiny.
With NewsCentral, Sinclair aimed to establish a national network of outlets that would transform local news broadcasts into platforms for the management’s favorite conservative causes. For example, after 9/11, Sinclair forced all of its stations to have on-air personalities pledge support for President George W. Bush and the War on Terror during their broadcasts. It forbid its Fox affiliate in Madison, Wisconsin, from airing ads produced by the Democratic National Committee during the summer of 2004. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Jon Leiberman, then the Washington bureau chief, complained that Sinclair was using its local stations to air “propaganda meant to sway the election,” and that the news manager, citing pressure from the top, consistently denied requests to report on the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib. An ex-producer at Sinclair said he was ordered not to report “any bad news out of Iraq—no dead servicemen, no reports on how much we’re spending, nothing.” And the producer that Sinclair sent to Iraq to report on the war called the resulting coverage “pro-Bush.” “You weren’t reporting news,” she explained. “You were reporting a political agenda that came down to you from the top of the food chain.”
By far the most prominent NewsCentral segment was “The Point,” a nightly editorial hosted by Hyman that Sinclair required all of its stations to broadcast. Hyman, in his late forties, is a proud navy man and former intelligence officer who decorates his walls with drawings of battleships and carries a POW-MIA bracelet engraved with the name of a U.S. war casualty from the Persian Gulf to remind himself of the cost of freedom.3 Hyman swaggers around the office with his chest puffed high, wears his hair in a wave, and on camera spouts invective with the subtlety of a shock jock. In some typical editorials Hyman railed against the “angry left” (“the least generous people in America” or the “blame America crowd”) and “clueless academia”; dismissed peace activists as “wack jobs” and Hans Blix and “his band of Keystone investigators” as incompetent; labeled the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and then senator Tom Daschle the “Obstructionist-in-Chief”; charged the NAACP president with being “intent on bomb-throwing”; and blasted the networks for their “skewed news coverage and bias.” As the 2004 election approached, Hyman opined that “the terrorist leaders would dearly love to see President Bush replaced by Senator Kerry.” His own policy preferences? Regressive tax reforms, such as a flat tax or a national sales tax, that would take from the middle class and give to the rich. Privatizing Medicare and Medicaid. Escalating the war in Iraq.4
Amid the deluge of conservative political news and commentary that flooded NewsCentral’s nightly broadcasts, however, Sinclair offered only a few drops of local political news. Not that this was uncommon. In the late 1990s a group of researchers affiliated with the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California decided to ask a simple question: during campaign season, when citizens need to learn about their political choices, how much information is available on broadcast television from the stations that promise to serve the public interest in exchange for a license to use the public airwaves?5
To find the answer, they began recording and analyzing evening news broadcasts in the run-up to local, state, and federal elections. In 1998, then again in 2000, 2002, and 2004, they assessed tens of thousands of stories from dozens of stations. Audience studies typically show that consumers want their news to be entertaining, but they also have strong interest in and demand for news about local political and civic issues. According to a recent survey conducted by the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, more than 93 percent of viewers believe that “an important function of local TV news is to inform people like you what’s happening in your community,” while more than 70 percent believe that “an important function of local TV news is to act as a watchdog looking over local government.” Television stations that broadcast the highest-quality news programs tend to get high ratings. But how much coverage of local election issues are television stations actually supplying during political prime time?6
Less than you might think. Consider the Lear Center’s report, Local News Coverage of the 2004 Campaigns. Between October 4 and November 1, a team of researchers led by Martin Kaplan observed 4,333 evening news broadcasts (from 5:00 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.) in eleven metropolitan markets reaching about one-quarter of the nation’s viewers, ranging in size from New York to Des Moines, and in region from Seattle to Dallas and Miami. Sixty-four percent of the broadcasts contained at least one election story, and 55 percent had a story about the presidential race. Yet a mere 8 percent of the broadcasts ran a story about a local candidate race, which includes campaigns for the U.S. Congress (the subject of 60 percent of the local political stories), state senate or assembly (1 percent), mayoral or city council seats, judgeships, law enforcement posts, education-related offices, and regional or county offices. The report documented the breakdown of a typical thirty-minute news broadcast: about nine minutes of commercials; six and one-half minutes for sports and weather; three minutes for elections (two minutes for the presidential campaign, and thirty seconds for congressional, state, and local races combined); two and one-half minutes for crime; less than two minutes for both local interest and teasers; less than a minute for unintentional injury and business; and about a minute for government, Iraq, and foreign policy, combined. In total, “eight times more coverage went to stories about accidental injuries, and 12 times more coverage to sports and weather, than to coverage of all local races combined. “7
Moreover, the local political stories that did air rarely provided useful information on policy matters. Only 32 percent of the stories concerned “issues,” and 5 percent addressed local ballot initiatives, whereas 44 percent focused on “strategy” and the “horse race” (the competition for office). Twenty-eight percent of the local campaign stories contained a soundbite, the average length of which was twelve seconds. Local candidates got considerably more exposure from paid advertisements than from news coverage (no wonder officials are so reluctant to endorse campaign finance reform), with commercial-to-news time ratios up to 17:1 for U.S. Senate candidates and 7:1 for those running for the House of Representatives.
These patterns held even in close, contentious races. In Washington State, for example, the dramatic gubernatorial election ended in a virtual draw, with the victorious candidate winning a recount by just over one hundred votes.8 During the last month of the campaign, 5 percent of the evening local news broadcasts in Seattle had a story about the election, while collectively Seattle television stations devoted fourteen times more airtime to teasers and bumper music than to the gubernatorial race. Perhaps surprisingly, the Lear Center detected significant variations in the ways that stations covered local politics, which they attributed to the principles and priorities of station and corporate managers. Managers at twenty of the forty-four stations in the study pledged to give candidates free airtime during the campaign, and these stations tended to provide more local political coverage, too. In Des Moines, Iowa, the Hearst-Argyle CBS affiliate KCCI dedicated 11 percent of its stories to local races, while one of the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s stations, Fox affiliate KDSM, “failed to air a single story about a local race.”9
THE LEAR CENTER’S REPORT PROVIDED RELIABLE MEASURES OF HOW little political news and civic information are available on local television; these data have helped convince a growing number of congressional leaders that what we can’t see can hurt us, and our democracy, too. But what we can see is equally disturbing. Civic groups have long complained about the famous formula that governs local news programming, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Communications scholars routinely blast local stations for saturating broadcasts with stories about crime, accidents, and small-scale crises, all of which lose context and meaning amid the superficial happy talk that anchors and reporters perform. Professional media critics—often the same ones who slam Top 40 radio stations that substitute market research for the taste of local DJs—regularly deride station managers for letting consultants, such as Frank Magid Associates, Audience Research &c Development, and the Broadcast Image Group, persuade them to place market considerations above news judgments, and to replace political and civic stories with “news you can use” and human-interest reports.10 Even other popular media outlets—newspapers, magazines, and Web sites—revel in contempt for local TV news. One recent BusinessWeek story opened, “Imagine a world in which local TV news doesn’t suck … It’s not easy. But try. Imagine an end to pointless news-chopper one-upmanship, to ‘breaking’ reports on trumped-up consumer scams, to the same-show-different-anchors feeling that viewers get nightly from West Palm Beach to Walla Walla.”11
The sources of the trouble with local TV news run deeper than most citizens recognize, and they are inextricably linked to media consolidation. In the past decade the concentration of ownership among a small number of large station owners that are particularly driven by bottom-line concerns has shifted editorial resources and programming control from the local to the national level. The results—a decline in primary television news reporting, the rise of fake local news broadcasts, and an increase of canned content such as infomercials and video news releases promoting commercial products or political propaganda—are pushing viewers to change the channel, and local TV stations are struggling to maintain their status as the nation’s most popular source of news.
Consider the complicated collaborative relationship between networks and their affiliated stations. The affiliates broadcast and promote network news and entertainment; but affiliates also compete with the networks, negotiating whether and how much the networks will compensate the affiliates for airing their new programs and charge them for syndicating their old ones, and whether and how much the affiliates can preempt network shows to air programs of local interest (such as political debates, telethons, parades, sports, and cultural events).12 The balance of power between networks and affiliates has shifted since the early 1990s, first tipping toward the affiliates of the three major networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) when Rupert Murdoch broke into the network’s territory and lured affiliates to Fox News Channel with competitive compensation offers, but then falling decidedly back toward the networks once Fox was established, new affiliates were aligned, and the FCC steadily increased the number of stations any one company could own. Station ownership caps rose from seven to twelve stations (as long as they reached no more than 25 percent of the national audience) in 1984, to any number of stations reaching less than 35 percent of the national audience in 1996 (a provision of the Telecommunications Act), and finally to 39 percent of the national audience in 2004.
In the last decade networks have joined other large media companies in expanding their holdings, establishing their “owned and operated” stations (“Network O&Os”) in the leading markets. As in radio, aggressive acquisitions strategies from Big Media conglomerates after the 1996 Telecom Act dramatically reduced the number of small, local station owners. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), by 2005 there remained four kinds of broadcasters: First, the major networks, which collectively “owned 126 stations, mostly in the biggest cities and in all areas of the country,” including all four top markets. Next, regional and speciality chains, such as Gannett, Belo, Hearst, and Tribune, which “are owned by companies with substantial investment in other media sectors” and “are often involved in business relationships with the four major networks.” Then there are midlevel chains whose “involvement in the television business is limited to what they receive from local station revenue.” Finally, there are small chains in minor markets, many of which are ultimately gobbled up by bigger players. “Vanishing,” the PEJ reported, “were the local owners with one or maybe two stations.”13
During the early years of the twenty-first century, network television executives insisted that their businesses were suffering from competition with cable and Internet news. But the PEJ left little doubt that television consolidation was a financial boon for big media firms. In 1995 “the ten biggest local television companies, which include the four networks and most of the major chains … had $5.9 billion in revenue and owned 104 stations. By 2002 those companies had doubled that revenue total and owned nearly three times as many stations,” their local stations typically generated proft margins between 30 and 40 percent, and “in larger cities the profit margins could be far higher.”14
With highly profitable O&Os in the top national markets and strong revenue streams coming from syndicated programming, the conglomerates that control networks—Disney/ABC, Viacom/CBS, General Electric/NBC Universal, and News Corporation/FOX—toughened their stance in negotiations with affiliates. By 2000, the networks were dramatically reducing compensation levels, demanding copayments for broadcasting popular sports events (such as the NCAA basketball tournament, the Olympics, and professional football), and in some cases even getting reverse compensation from affiliates. The E. W. Scripps Company, which owns ten network affiliate stations but none in the top ten markets, reported that its network compensation dropped from about $16 million to about $8 million between 1998 and 2002, for an average loss of nearly $1 million per station.15 Alan Frank, the president of Post-Newsweek Stations, told me that his company’s CBS affiliate in Jacksonville severed its ties with the network after “they offered a compensation renewal package that was at best punitive. They wanted reverse compensation for the NCAA tournament, they cut what they offered us, and they weren’t giving us a rebate for the stinkers. It was a bold plan to transfer money from one side to the other. We were the second-highest-rated station in the market, so we left.”
The networks assert power over the affiliates in other ways, too, such as pressuring affiliates not to preempt national shows for special local programs, and expanding their claim on prime-time advertising minutes. Frank estimated that the typical affiliate controls around 20 to 25 percent of the prime-time advertising units, with the remainder going to the networks. Hank Price, former vice president and general manager of the CBS O&O in Chicago and now president and general manager of the Hearst-Argyle-owned NBC affiliate in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, told me that “a prime-time show like ER is going to bring in a lot of advertising revenue, but [stations] don’t have a lot of those minutes to keep.” Popular syndicated programs also generate significantly more revenue for the networks than for the affiliates. “After payroll, syndication is the second-highest cost for most local stations,” Price said. “Shows like Oprah and Dr. Phil cost so much money that you don’t make much from them. Oprah in New York City costs about $500,000 per week. Even in Hartford you pay $50,0000 a week. But you air Oprah and Dr. Phil because they bring in viewers, and you keep them for news.”
Although the networks had won the fight to lift station ownership caps in 1996, by 2000 they were aggressively lobbying for another increase, with some industry leaders pushing Congress to remove the caps outright. Yet the Network Affiliated Stations Alliance, the umbrella organization of ABC, CBS, and NBC affiliate boards, pushed back. Frank, who chaired the group, told the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that “the growth in network power is remarkable and is felt in significant ways across the broadcast community … today local broadcasters have less independence, less ability to make sound programming decisions for their local communities.”16 He outlined the hazards of further consolidating broadcast television in a scathing editorial published by USA Today in 2002.
If that 35% cap is lifted, the networks will gobble up stations. What will viewers lose if this happens? Local and regional coverage, whether it’s local weather or news or candidate debates or high school sports or charity events important to a community …
National networks have an economic incentive to broadcast all network programming, even when non-network programming would better serve a local community. That’s because networks make money by selling national advertising—and those ad rates go up when TV ratings go up, which happens when the network’s programs are broadcast by all of its local affiliates. The syndication value of network-owned programs also increases when they are broadcast nationwide.
Even under existing rules, networks exert economic leverage over TV stations by threatening to penalize them or terminate their network affiliation if they pre-empt more than a few hours of network programming. During the 2000 presidential election, for example, NBC demanded that its affiliates air game one of the American League baseball playoffs rather than the first presidential debate. After station owners protested long and hard, NBC backed down. If NBC had owned stations covering more of the nation, it could have gotten its way.
Abolishing the cap also would lead to fewer choices for consumers in other ways. When networks recently were permitted to enter the program-syndication business, the number of major syndicates dropped from dozens in 1996 to a handful today—most of them tied to the networks. If networks gain control of more local stations, they’re apt to pressure the locals to use their own syndicated shows, further reducing regional programming variations.
The networks argue that they need to buy up their affiliated stations in order to earn a profit and compete with cable and satellite television. But even with artificial accounting practices that make them look less profitable than they really are, the networks collectively reaped profits of more than $4 billion in 2000. And despite the inroads made by cable and satellite, broadcast television retains its dominance, accounting for about 60% of total national viewership.17
Deprived of revenue, autonomy, and negotiating power, the affiliates have had to search for new sources of income. Broadcasting paid programming is among the most popular strategies, and today info-mercials and home-shopping shows generate over $5 billion a year in sales. Deregulation is doubly responsible for spreading infomercials over the public airwaves. In 1984 the Reagan administration pushed Congress to eliminate caps on the amount of time that television broadcasters could sell to advertisers, allowing network affiliates to join cable channels in the infomercial business. Yet station managers found it unsavory and were reluctant to do so—until 1996, when the Telecom Act was passed; then networks acquired their own outlets and cut payments to affiliates, leaving local stations few options for making up the income that were easier than scheduling paid programming. Since then the number of infomercials on the air has soared; leading companies, such as Gateway Computers, Sony, Carnival Cruise Lines, and Time Life, have produced their own programs; and infomercials have entered the daytime as well as late-night schedule. In 2002 Forbes reported that during a typical month, “300,000 infomercial spots appear on 36 national cable stations and 1,800 broadcast stations … To watch them all would take you roughly 1,027 years—and it might seem longer.”18
Most infomercials use news and talk show formats to disguise the fact that they are pure sales pitches, designed to market products such as the Ronco Showtime Platinum Rotisserie and BBQ, Slim Down Solution, the Torso Tiger, the Body by Jake Bun and Thigh Rocker, and all varieties of abdominal exercise machines (including three that require no actual exercise—just plug them in, strap them on, and they’ll work your muscles for you). Occasionally local news reporters participate, drawing on their journalistic credibility to promote and legitimate the products and the programs. Some stations have found more subtle ways to integrate commercial pitches into their broadcasts, blurring the fuzzy line between news and advertisement that is supposed to separate the marketing and editorial divisions of journalistic organizations. In Tampa, for example, one broadcaster sold four-minute segments of airtime on its morning news program for $2,600. In Philadelphia, KYW-TV used a local television medical reporter to introduce a sixty-minute prime-time special, Health Test, which promoted cardiac specialists at the Albert Einstein Medical Center, the program sponsor, leaving viewers unsure whether the show was news or advertisement.19At a media reform conference in 2003, FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, who has become an outspoken critic of paid programming, said, “We may be getting tighter abs, but we’re also getting flabby democracy.”
LOCAL NEWS, WHICH TYPICALLY GENERATES A THIRD OR MORE OF A station’s revenues because (unlike network programming) stations don’t have to share advertising income from news with networks, is the real profit center of affiliates. In recent years stations have responded to the economic pressures born of consolidation and the rise of national cable networks by airing more local newscasts than ever before. In the early 1990s typical affiliates in medium and large markets broadcast around three or four hours of local news per weekday. Today many of those stations have doubled their news offerings, broadcasting two to four hours of news in the early morning, a half hour or hour at midday, an hour and a half in the early evening, and another half hour late. But here’s the rub: local stations, whether owned by small chains, midsize companies, or networks, have not increased their staffing levels to match the production needs of their news-heavy schedules, and in some cases they have actually reduced personnel while increasing their news offerings.
How do they make it work? By squeezing as much work as they can out of their reporters, producers, and anchors. By relying on video news releases that disguise government propaganda or commercial marketing as journalism and allow stations to customize preprogrammed content so that it looks homemade. By faking local stories in which on-air personalities perform the role of reporters while reading ready-made scripts. By broadcasting stories available from national news sources on satellite feeds. By purchasing video and, occasionally, reporting from private companies. By combining stations into one newsroom and sharing staffs across channels. And, in some companies, by centralizing news operations into a single studio where news directors dictate editorial spin to their small local staffs. If the parallels with broadcast radio are striking, it’s because during the late 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century television companies looked to conglomerates like Clear Channel to learn how to make consolidation work. As the former FCC chairman Reed Hundt predicted, “Radio is the model. That’s the harbinger for what’s going to happen to TV.”20 By 2000, it was already happening, and nowhere is this clearer than at the headquarters for the company whose Des Moines station aired no local political stories during the 2004 election, Sinclair Broadcast Group.
WHEN I VISITED SINCLAIR’S HEADQUARTERS ON A MILD WINTER DAY IN December 2004, Mark Hyman showed off the operation with the pride of a new parent. Sinclair, he explained, set up NewsCentral so that its stations could compete with network affiliates in the advertising market for local news. “Thirty to thirty-five percent of the advertisers in any typical market only buy on local news,” Hyman told me. “If you’re looking at pure dollars and cents, do we want to be in a business where, at best, we’re only competing for seventy percent of the dollars?” Sinclair needed that income because it was saddled with debt from its aggressive acquisition strategy in the 1990s, and its revenues, around $739 million in 2003 and $736 million in 2002, lagged behind those of other station groups.21 But rather than spend money for a full news operation at each of its stations, Sinclair came up with a cheaper alternative: it hired skeleton staffs at local stations and integrated their light reporting with a centrally cast news program that was produced in the Maryland headquarters but designed to look like local news. Hyman claimed that Sinclair designed the NewsCentral model to start low-cost newscasts on stations that never before carried local news. Like his colleagues at Clear Channel, Hyman had learned the language of journalistic ethics and civic responsibility, and he was eager to testify as to the depth of Sinclair’s commitment to the communities it served. Sinclair did start newscasts on the WB and UPN channels, which had not previously had them. But Sinclair also bought network affiliates with flourishing news programs, slashed the staffing levels, and converted them to the NewsCentral model despite intense local complaints. In St. Louis, Missouri, Sinclair closed the entire news division of its ABC affiliate KDNL and has not broadcast local news since October 2001.22
As we toured the NewsCentral studios, Hyman called my attention to the main sets, especially the anchor desk and the backdrops. They were created to match those at Sinclair’s affiliates, leading viewers to think that on-air personalities broadcasting from the Hunt Valley studios were actually in the same room with the handful of local news reporters it employed at each station. Josh Silver, the executive director of the media reform organization Free Press, complained to me that “there’s no indication that these pieces are coming from NewsCentral in Maryland, no disclaimer. I’m a full-time media critic, I’ve got a Sinclair station, and I thought Hyman was local! The first week I saw him, I thought, ‘Wow, they got a real right-wing wacko here in Springfield, Massachusetts.’ I didn’t know they were central casting.”
Sinclair blew its cover in 2004, its third year operating News-Central, when it used its fleet of local stations to take center stage in the presidential campaign. Sinclair caused its first election-year scandal that April, when it forbid its ABC affiliates from broadcasting The Fallen, a Nightline special in which Ted Koppel read the names of American soldiers killed in the Iraq war. As veterans’ groups and a bipartisan group of congressional leaders protested the act of censorship, Broadcasting & Cable editorialized that “Sinclair has simply replaced Nightline’s worthy tribute with its own political agenda.”23 U.S. senator John McCain, a former POW, wrote harsher words in an open letter to the company: “Your decision to deny your viewers an opportunity to be reminded of war’s terrible costs, in all their heartbreaking detail, is a gross disservice to the public, and to the men and women of the United States Armed Forces. It is, in short, sir, unpatriotic. I hope it meets with the public opprobrium it most certainly deserves.”24
Sinclair executives brushed off the charge, and in October, just weeks before the election, they notified affiliates that they planned to preempt regular coverage with Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal, a documentary in which former prisoners of war accused presidential candidate John Kerry of inciting additional violence against American POWs and prolonging the war through his own domestic and international antiwar campaign. Again, scores of public officials, citizen groups, and media watchdogs protested. The Kerry campaign condemned Sinclair’s use of its local broadcast licenses to influence the race as “un-American,” and demanded that the Federal Election Committee consider the program an illegal in-kind contribution from Sinclair to the Republican Party.25 But Sinclair did not back down from its plans to broadcast Stolen Honor until after the investment firm Glickenhaus &c Co. threatened to sue the company for placing its political agenda ahead of its fiduciary obligations to shareholders. Lehman Brothers called the decision to show the special “potentially damaging—both financially and politically,” and Moody’s Investment Service downgraded its rating for Sinclair from “stable” to “negative.”26 Ultimately Sinclair aired AP.O.W. Story: Politics, Pressure, and the Media, its own special on how the media influences voting, while denying that it ever planned to broadcast Stolen Honor in its entirety.
When I asked Hyman and Smith, the president and CEO, if the public outcry over Sinclair’s apparent plans to air Stolen Honor had changed their editorial direction, they looked at each other incredulously, then talked to me as if I were insane. “I’d do one of those Stolen Honor specials every month if we could,” declared Smith, an imposing man with a pink complexion, small facial features, big opinions, and a blustery, confrontational manner. “The lesson was very straightforward: that we can do this kind of content, preempt network, and make more money. There is no question in our mind now that we can do news-type specials on subject matter that is of broad interest to people and make more money, whether it’s a national-interest kind of story or local-interest kind of story. We can do those stories and make more money. That now becomes a consideration for us and the whole news infrastructure that we have in place.” Hyman agreed. He said the Stolen Honor controversy “was ten million dollars’ worth of free advertising. People who’d never heard of us before suddenly knew who we were. Now we’re getting all the press releases, phone calls, and interviews that were hard for us to get before. We’re on the map.”
SINCLAIR WAS FOUNDED BY THE LATE JULIAN SINCLAIR SMITH, WHO obtained a UHF license in 1971 and set up WBFF, a small, family-owned broadcasting company in Baltimore. In 1986, his four sons, David, Frederick, Robert, and J. Duncan, joined Julian to build a large television company, which they called the Sinclair Broadcast Group. In 1990 the brothers took over and, as the company’s Web site says, “set out to make their vision a reality.”27
David already had experience in media—but not the kind most of his colleagues in television would appreciate. In the 1970s he was a partner in a business called Ciné Processors, which copied porn films from the basement of a building owned by another of his father’s companies, the Commercial Radio Institute. “We had the lab in operation for like a year,” recalled David Williams, Smith’s partner in the operation. “We got videotapes copied onto film and put the soundtrack on a cassette. The first one was Deep Throat, which had just opened in New York and hadn’t opened anywhere else. All you had to do was get the film and the sound in sync, and you had something that was not available anywhere. We’d just solicit guys in the strip joint area and tried to sell them.”
Smith’s media connections came in handy in 1996, when he was arrested on suspicion of soliciting a prostitute who, police said, performed “an unnatural and perverted sex-act on him” in a Mercedes owned by Sinclair. As a special form of community service, Smith arranged with prosecutors to have Sinclair broadcast televised reports on state drug courts. LuAnne Canipe, a Sinclair reporter, recalled a Baltimore judge complaining to her about the deal. “The judge was outraged,” she later told Salon’s Eric Boehlert. “He said, ‘How can employees do community service for their boss?’”
By that point David Smith had plenty of experience engineering ways to get around legal restrictions that hampered his competitors. In 1991 he wanted to purchase WPGH-TV in Pittsburgh, even though he already owned another station in town, WPTT, and federal communications policy prohibited any company from controlling more than one broadcast outlet in a market. So, following the regulatory route paved by radio entrepreneurs, Sinclair’s lawyers—whom current and former FCC staffers regard as among the most aggressive in the industry—asked the FCC to break precedent and allow them to set up a Local Marketing Agreement (LMA), in which they could sell WPTT to an African American station manager and Sinclair employee, Eddie Edwards, as Sinclair continued to run it. The FCC, which had expressed interest in supporting minority station owners, agreed, and Smith was proud of the arrangement. “What an opportunity that was to give something back to the African American community!” he told me. Rainbow/PUSH saw it differently, accusing Edwards of being a front man for Sinclair, and the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters later opposed his dealings with the Smith family.28
In the following years the Smiths further pushed the limits of FCC ownership rules, forging other LMAs with their friend Edwards and their mother, Carolyn Smith. With Carolyn’s capital, she and Edwards created a company called Glencairn, through which they bought stations in cities where Sinclair already operated and quickly transferred control to David. Carolyn then transferred her ownership interests in Glencairn, roughly 90 percent of the company, into trusts for her grandchildren, children of the Smith brothers.
After years of lobbying by the television industry, the FCC relaxed its restrictions on ownership in 1999, allowing duopolies in markets with eight or more voices (or owners), on the condition that only one station is rated in the top four. Soon after, Sinclair replaced Glencairn as the proposed purchaser of a station in Oklahoma City, without protest from Glencairn, which had purportedly been planning the deal for its own independent interests. Next, Glencairn petitioned to sell five stations to Sinclair in cities where duopolies were now legal. This was too much for the FCC, and in 2001 it ruled that Sinclair exercised illegal control of its business partner. Yet the commission, still reluctant to regulate, chose to grant four of the five licenses to Sinclair anyway, leveling a nominal forty-thousand-dollar fine as punishment. Commissioner Michael Copps was incredulous, and, in the manner of a Supreme Court justice dismayed by his colleagues’ decision, he authored a scathing dissent.
The assessment of a fine combined with the approval of the transfers at issue is incongruous. The finding that an illegal transfer of control occurred at least raises questions about the control of Glencairn on an ongoing basis, and about the independence of Glencairn from Sinclair once Glencairn is controlled by the mother of Sinclair’s owners and owned in trust for their minor children … With each transaction over the years, Sinclair has stretched the limits of the Commission’s local television ownership rules … The transactions before the Commission today raise issues that prompted the majority to find that there has been an illegal transfer of control and to assess a fine. But the Commission nonetheless has allowed the transaction to go through without further review. Each transaction moves the line to which all of our licenses are subject. And this decision moves it further still.29
Despite the ruling, David Smith told me, “[At Sinclair] we’re so pristine about the way we do things, we’re so black and white there’s no gray on us.” His mother helped clear the record by changing Glencairn’s name to Cunningham Broadcasting. Today she nominally owns more television stations than any other woman in the United States.
Cunningham’s official street address is on West Forty-first Street in Baltimore, which is also the home of Sinclair’s local Baltimore station, WBFF. Before I visited I didn’t know whether Carolyn Smith spent much time there running the operation. When I was sitting in Mark Hyman’s office in Sinclair’s Hunt Valley headquarters, she strolled over on her walker and delivered him the mail. “Mrs. Smith is amazing,” Hyman told me. “She’s here every day sorting the mail. And if you touch it before her, you’re in big trouble.”
DURING THE RUN-UP TO THE 2004 ELECTION, THE OTHER UNTOUCHABLE at Sinclair was Armstong Williams, the conservative African American pundit and “special analyst” to whom Smith gave many of the news division’s plum assignments, including interviews with Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and former House majority whip Tom DeLay. Williams even got an hour on camera with Dick Cheney in December 2003, at a time when the vice president was refusing all other media requests. “The news director wanted to get Williams’s face on our news program as much as possible,” one Sinclair veteran told me. “Management here loves him.” The feeling is mutual. “David Smith is a good friend,” Williams explained to me. “I had pursued Sinclair for a long time to do stuff with them. It’s a big fish. Sinclair brought me stuff that I did not have—real numbers, where you can get the Speaker of the House or the VP. I was a part of that team, man. I was there for election coverage; I covered a lot of that campaign. If there was breaking news, I’d cover it for them, too.” Williams had plenty of other media work, including a television and radio show called The Right Side, a syndicated weekly column with Tribune Media Services, and regular invitations to appear on national news shows. But Sinclair was special, he said. “They added a real audience. On Sinclair I was talking to millions of viewers a night.”
Williams had another job during the 2004 campaign. In the beginning of that year, the U.S. Department of Education paid him $241,000 of taxpayer money to promote its controversial policy agenda through his media contacts and appearances. Because of Williams, Education Secretary Rod Paige got access to Sinclair viewers, too. Williams’s contract with the Department of Education required that he help Paige get airtime, and the pundit delivered, granting the cabinet member responsible for his lucrative deal a long interview that Sinclair broadcast nationally, without disclosing Williams’s relationship with the government. Smith said he didn’t know about the contract, and managing editor Carl Gottlieb denied anyone at Sinclair was aware of Williams’s deal. But Smith also told me, “I don’t have a clue if anyone at Sinclair knew about it … It wasn’t a secret.” The Sinclair producer who edited the interview remembered it regretfully. “It was the worst piece of TV I’ve ever been associated with. A terrible interview. A love fest. You’ve seen softballs from Larry King, right? Well, this was softer. I told my boss it didn’t even deserve to be broadcast, but they kept pushing me to put more of it on tape. In retrospect, it was so clearly propaganda.”
Williams’s arrangement with the Department of Education remained unreported until January 2005, when USA Today obtained a copy of his contract through a Freedom of Information Act request and published a major story, headlined “Education Dept. Paid Commentator to Promote Law.”30 The FCC’s Payola Rules leave little doubt that either Williams or Sinclair could have broken the law, since Williams was legally obligated to disclose his government contract to Sinclair, and if Sinclair knew about the deal, it was legally obligated to tell its viewers.31
As the story spiraled into a major political scandal, Tribune Media Services, which had syndicated Williams’s newspaper column, claimed that it had not known about the contract and cut its ties to the pundit. Sinclair’s contract with Williams expired in late 2004, but when I last spoke with him Smith left open the possibility that Williams will return, telling me, “We want to study the whole relationship and find out what the facts are. I don’t think we can trust what the USA Today says.” Williams is confident that Sinclair will have him back. “David Smith has stood beside me as a friend. He does not abandon you during the storm. I’m not too concerned about my relationship with Sinclair, if you know what I mean.”
Most professional journalists and media watchdogs felt otherwise, as did the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which conducted a thorough investigation of the Williams case and reported that the Bush administration had used him to illegally disseminate “covert propaganda.”32 The reports of Armstong Williams’s dual roles in paid politics and punditry raised questions about the prevalence of this practice, and in the first months of 2005 mounting concerns over the government’s use of taxpayer dollars to disseminate propaganda through the media motivated a series of investigations.
The crass form of political payola that the Department of Education funded is unusual, yet weeks after the Williams story broke, the Washington Post and USA Today reported that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had paid two other syndicated columnists, Maggie Gallagher and Mike McManus, to promote a controversial $300-million marriage initiative that diverted federal funds from welfare to marriage counseling. Gallagher, whose column is distributed by Universal Press Syndicate, received $21,500 for writing her support, while McManus, whose Ethics & Religion column appears in about forty newspapers, had personally accepted up to $10,000 as well as an additional $49,000 more for his foundation, Marriage Savers. Like Williams, Gallagher and McManus had not publicly disclosed the deals in their columns or in other media appearances.33 Once they were exposed, however, the president decided that political payola was no longer viable. Following his second inauguration, Bush announced, “We will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet.”34
ACTUALLY, THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION HAD ALREADY EMBRACED A MORE effective way of producing promotional material that passes as journalism: video news releases (VNRs), the prepackaged “news” stories manufactured for government agencies and businesses by commercial production companies and distributed via satellite or Internet so multiple networks and local broadcasters can air them in real time. VNRs are analogous to print press releases: they typically endorse a policy or a product; they present only one side of an issue; they often serve as provocation for independent reporting by the journalists who receive them. Yet what sets them apart from ordinary PR releases is that they are explicitly designed so that producers have the option of either customizing the content, using their own on-air personalities to read ready-made scripts that accompany the footage, or simply broadcasting them as is. Usually VNRs blend into a newscast without viewers noticing that the segments are canned. Regular viewers of local news programs have seen thousands of them. Yet networks and affiliates are loath to acknowledge, let alone report, on their own use of VNRs, so most Americans are unaware that they exist.
Businesses have always been the main users of VNRs. Pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment suppliers, insurers, automobile manufacturers, and telecommunications firms, among others, hire VNR producers to craft stories that subtly market new products. But government agencies, particularly under the Bush administration, have stepped up their use of VNRs, too. Rather than (or in addition to) paying the high costs of filming and broadcasting a commercial, businesses or governments invest around twenty-five thousand dollars for a VNR and hope that affiliates throughout the country will air them as news stories. “It’s a crapshoot,” said Tom DeVries, who ended his long career as a journalist and television producer at several leading network affiliates and opened his own video production company, DeVries Media, where we met in 2004. “But you may get four, five, six million impressions, from New York to Tuscaloosa to Anniston, Alabama, the smallest commercial television market in the United States.” The potential audience is not only large but also a credulous one because viewers believe they are watching journalism. As one VNR maker, KEF Media Associates, advertises, “VNRs deliver specific client messages within the credible editorial content of a newscast.”35
Leading VNR producers, such as Larry Moscowitz, the president and CEO of the industry leader Medialink, like to say that VNRs have existed since the Eisenhower administration. According to John Stauber from the Center for Media and Democracy and Sheldon Rampton of PR Watch, VNRs were not widely used until the 1980s, “when PR firms discovered that they could use film, edit and produce their own news segments—even entire programs—and that broadcasters would play the segments as ‘news,’ often with no editing.”36 But not that often yet. DeVries remembered how little he and his colleagues at a San Francisco station respected VNRs when they first received them. “It was 1984 or ‘85. The VNR was from the Israeli Embassy, and the package contained a three-quarter-inch tape and a bunch of paper. We all booed it. We thought, ‘Maybe they do these in Salt Lake City, but we do not do this here.’ I left the newsroom in 1993, and at that time VNRs were still treated with disdain.”
By the 1990s and early 2000s, however, local stations were heightening their use of VNRs and other external sources for news, such as CNN Newsource or the Associated Press Television News service, and today one PR company advertises that “90 percent of TV newsrooms now rely on VNRs.”37 Nielsen Media Research studies conducted through the 1990s found that virtually every broadcaster used VNRs in their newscasts, and that the number of VNRs per broadcast increased over time. According to Marion Just and Tom Rosenstiel, “From 1998 to 2002, a study of 33,911 television reports found, the percentage of ‘feed’ material from third-party sources rose to 23 percent of all reports from 14 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of stories that included a local correspondent fell to 43 percent from 62 percent. Local broadcasters are being asked to do more with less, and they have been forced to rely more on prepackaged news to take up the slack.”38
Advanced technologies make the process more efficient and less expensive. Whereas in the 1980s VNR makers paid to mail cassettes to each potential outlet, today both large and small producers use digital recording tools that stations can easily manipulate as well as satellite distribution systems that make the segments immediately available to broadcasters with the right equipment. But another main reason that VNRs are so common is that the cookie-cutter content they provide reduces stations’ need for paid reporters, and affiliates can use them to reach the high profit margins their corporate owners and investors demand by filling the air with news from nowhere rather than with expensive journalists and production crews.
In addition to VNRs, stations can purchase and customize longer reports for sweeps periods from companies such as NewsProNet. According to Stanford University’s Grade the News project, the result is that television stations across the United States run the same special “investigative story,” using their own on-air personalities to read identical scripts or perform mock interviews with people who have already been taped. At least six local newscasts in U.S. cities broadcast their own version of a NewsProNet’s exposé that warned viewers about Innovis, a “secret” credit bureau company that was collecting private information about customers and selling it without permission. But Grade the News looked into the story and found that “each claim was misleading. The company, Innovis, isn’t secret. It doesn’t report to those who might approve your car or house loan. And according to the story’s own sources, it’s received far fewer complaints than its competitors.”39Not only had the stations failed to check these facts on their own; several framed the story to look as if they had reported it themselves.
There’s nothing illegal about making, distributing, or broadcasting a VNR that promotes a commercial product or a canned news item. But it hardly counts as local journalism, especially when the audio, video, and recommended script come from a remote source, and pretending that it does violates conventional journalistic ethics. On several occasions researchers and investigative journalists have found that station managers who use VNRs publicly deny that they do so. Many say the practice has become so common that they do not make special note of it in their records.40
The rules for broadcasting VNRs made by government agencies are different. Federal law prohibits the use of public funds for covert publicity or propaganda. During the 2005 payola scandal, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned heads of federal departments and agencies that stations using prepackaged political news are obligated to provide “clear disclosure to the television viewing audience that this material was prepared by or in cooperation with the government department or agency.” Government agencies that make VNRs share this responsibility. As the GAO states, “While agencies generally have the right to disseminate information about their policies and activities, agencies may not use appropriated funds to produce or distribute prepackaged news stories intended to be viewed by television audiences that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television audience that the agency was the source of those materials.”41 Making VNRs to market government programs so that citizens learn about the services available to them is acceptable. Misleading citizens by airing them without disclosing the fact that government agencies produced or sponsored them is not.
USING VNRS IS A BIPARTISAN PRACTICE. CONCERNS OVER THE WHITE House’s efforts to promote policies through VNRs first emerged during Bill Clinton’s presidency. In 1996 David Bartlett, then president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, complained that “the White House doesn’t want you to know that they are spending taxpayers’ money peddling these phony interviews with [President Clinton.] I mean, that harms his credibility … members of Congress do it routinely.”42 Under Clinton, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) produced a series of VNRs on prescription drug and preventive health benefits that purposely deceived viewers, closing with a paid performer who used the standard journalistic sign off, “Lovell Brigham, reporting.”43
The first public outcry over George W. Bush’s misuse of VNRs came in January 2004, when HHS issued a fake news story to promote a controversial Medicare prescription benefit program. HHS crossed the line by providing a script that refers to Karen Ryan, the public relations consultant who appears in the story, as a “reporter,” and then having Ryan end her praise for the policy—“This is a program that gets an A-plus!”—with the familiar send off, “In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting.” Neither the video footage nor the anchor scripts stated explicitly that HHS made the package.
Ryan is a veteran VNR performer who had made videos with seven federal agencies in 2003 and 2004, and many others for commercial clients. The HHS segment got special attention because the GAO discovered it while investigating the administration’s use of public funds to promote the Medicare prescription plan, and because forty local stations ran the Ryan “report” as news. Although media critics and Democrats condemned the department for deceiving the public, HHS spokesman Kevin Keane dismissed the concerns. “The use of video news releases is a common, routine practice in government and the private sector,” he told the New York Times. “Anyone who has questions about this practice needs to do some research on modern public information tools.”44
Though Clinton and congressional Democrats used VNRs frequently in the 1990s, the Bush administration—where a top adviser famously disparaged the “reality-based community” and declared, “When we act, we create our own reality”—helped make them standard tools of governance.45 Overall, the first Bush administration spent $250 million on contracts with private public relations firms between 2001 and 2004, nearly doubling the $128 million spent by the Clinton administration between 1997 and 2000.46 According to a New York Times investigation, the Bush administration ushered in “a new age of prepackaged TV news” in which “all participants benefit … Local affiliates are spared the expense of digging up original material. Public relations firms secure government contracts worth millions of dollars. The major networks, which help distribute the releases, collect fees from the government agencies that produce segments and the affiliates that show them. The administration, meanwhile, gets out an unfiltered message, delivered in the guise of traditional reporting.” Under Bush, the report continues, “at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments … Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgment of the government’s role in their production.”47 The price tag for the administration’s foreign and domestic policy PR reached unprecedented levels. As the GAO, drawing on a survey of only seven of the fifteen cabinet-level departments, reported, between January 2003 and June 2005, “the Administration spent $1.6 billion on contracts with advertising agencies ($1.4 billion), public relations firms ($197 million), and media organizations and individual members of the media ($15 million).”48
Political agencies at all levels of government are certain to continue making VNRs until Congress formally prohibits the practice, and local television stations are certain to continue broadcasting them. The revelatory reports about VNRs and other fake TV news that the major print media (and particularly the New York Times) published in the spring of 2005 ended years of public silence on the issue. Predictably, by summer the covert propaganda scandals had churned out of the news cycle. In April 2006 the Center for Media and Democracy and Free Press issued a report showing that seventy-seven local televisions stations—including seven owned by Sinclair, seven by Tribune, six by Viacom, six by Fox, and two by Clear Channel—had aired VNRs as if they were legitimate news reports between June 2005 and March 2006. As always, local television news programs did not report on the practice.
Today Comedy Central’s The Daily Show is one of the only television programs that continues to cover the story of how Americans’ most popular and trusted source of information deceives viewers with VNRs. The humor show has itself become a popular source of news, especially among young adults, and faux-anchor Jon Stewart has earned the trust of a national audience that is ever more skeptical of networks and affiliates. The coverage of televised propaganda, noted the media critic Daniel Price, would be hilarious if it weren’t so disturbing. “Out of TV’s many journalistic outlets,” he wrote, “it [takes] a fake news show to expose a real news show for passing fake news off as real.”