free market tv at work

Sinclair Broadcast Group is planning on forcing it's entire pocket of television stations to break federal election law by making them broadcast an anti-Kerry documentary called Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal. This is a blatent attempt to undermine Kerry in several swing states. I doubt that they'll get away with this (as I would hope that the FEC would then require Sinclair to broadcast two hours of anti-Bush propoganda in order to balance out their coverage in accordance to election laws), but it's horrible of them to even plan this.

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you may remember last April when I wrote about Sinclair's decision to force several of their stations to preempt Nightline's ghastly plans to honor our fallen soldiers in Iraq by dedicating a broadcast to reading their names. As I pointed out then, the board invests a lot of money in the Republican Party and it's candidates. This, of course, makes the motives of their decision to air an anti-Kerry documentary that much more obvious.

This sort of activity goes to show just how badly we need such things as campaign finance reform, election reform, and re-increased regulation of public airwaves. Because remember, these are public airwaves belonging to you and me and the other millions of Americans out there, and we don't deserve to have the politics of the haves (in this case, those that have enough to buy large numbers of television stations) shoved down our throats like this. The industry has been de-regulated a lot in the last years, and this just goes to show why it's such a bad thing; why it's such a bad thing that the media is becoming more and more monopolized; and why we need to change this country by getting someone who's not a total nutjob into the Whitehouse.