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New Right-Wing Owner to Baltimore Sun Reporters: 'Go Make Me Some Money'
"The Sinclair TV owner bought The Baltimore Sun for the same reason Elon Musk bought Twitter," opined one critic. "Power."
Jan 17, 2024
New Baltimore Sun owner and right-wing media executive David D. Smith raised eyebrows and ire in media circles and beyond following a Tuesday meeting at which he reportedly insulted journalists at his new acquisition and told them to focus on profit.
Smith, the multimillionaire head of the Sinclair Broadcasts Group—a network notorious for its fealty to former U.S. President Donald Trump—purchased the Sun, along with a bevy of other Maryland papers, last week for what The New Republicdescribed as an "unspecified, nine-figure" amount from Alden Global Capital, an investment firm known for its cost-cutting ways.
Sinclair started out in Baltimore and the Sunreported that it's the first time in nearly four decades that the paper will be locally owned. However, NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik atold "All Things Considered" host Juana Summers that Sun staffers left the meeting with Smith "fairly on edge."
Smith "said he's only read [the Sun] about four times, which is kind of astonishing for a guy whose family has been there for more than a half-century," Folkenflik said, adding that the new owner also argued that the paper "just isn't offering people news that is holding local government actors accountable."
"This," Folkenflik added, "for a newspaper that, you know, revealed corruption by the then-mayor of Baltimore that led to the Sunwinning a Pulitzer just a few short years ago."
The once-venerable Sun has, in fact, won 16 Pulitzer Prizes over its storied history.
Folkenflik, who once worked for the Sun, noted:
It has a really proud heritage going back to 1837. The story of the Sun, nonetheless, is kind of the story of modern American newspapering. Alden is the latest in a string of big corporate owners that has, you know, time after time, decade after decade, whittled down or slashed its staffs and its ambitions. The paper has shrunk pretty sharply.
Media accountability advocates expressed alarm and concern over Smith's purchase of the Sun. Popular Information publisher Judd Legum noted that the paper's new owner is a donor to far-right groups including Project Veritas, Turning Point USA, and Moms for Liberty.
"Sinclair Broadcasting, which is controlled by the Smith family,
forces nearly 200 local TV affiliates to run right-wing pro-Trump political commentary," Legum said. "Sinclair affiliates have also promoted right-wing conspiracy theories, including claims that [Democratic National Committee] staffer Seth Rich was murdered by a hitman as payback for sharing sensitive emails to WikiLeaks."
Sinclair and Smith have been closely aligned with the Trump family. Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner has admitted that the former president and 2024 GOP front-runner's campaign
struck a deal with Sinclair in 2016 for access in exchange for more favorable coverage.
"We are here to deliver your message," Smith
told the Trump campaign. "Period."
Smith is also openly inimical toward the mainstream media—including the
Sun. According toThe Baltimore Banner, he told New York Magazine in 2018 that he viewed print media to be "so left-wing as to be meaningless dribble."
Pressed during Tuesday's meeting whether he still believed this, Smith answered in the affirmative. Asked if that included the paper he just bought, he replied, "in many ways, yes."
Sun staffers present at Tuesday's meeting told Folkenflik that their new boss seemed especially focused on the paper's bottom line.
"Smith told his new staffers that, you know, the
Sun was profitable but that he meant to make it more profitable," Folkenflik told Summers.
According to the Banner, he told them to "go make me some money."
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The Day American Journalists Have to Flee a Fully Fascist United States
Across the world, dictators, authoritarians, and wannabee dictators are using Trump’s epithet “fake news” to attack journalists with a vengeance.
Jul 06, 2023
Last week’s holiday weekend gave Louise and me an opportunity to take a week off to visit a few friends and take a break from American politics. Instead, we got a splash of cold water in the face; it’s an amazing story.
We started our trip near Barcelona, Spain, where we spent the day and had a wonderful meal and fascinating, detail-rich conversation with Raw Storyeditor Roxanne Cooper and her husband, Earl.
You may recall that the Daily Take I wrote from Cardiz the next day, inspired in part by our discussion, was about how Spain had been fascist from the 1930s right up until Francisco Franco died in 1975 and how “normal” life can seem under a fascist regime — just so long as you’re not political or a member of the press.
The simple reality, known well to the Framers of our Constitution, is that a free, open, and independent press is essential to a functioning democracy.
From there we visited Morocco, the seventeenth-most-dangerous country in the world to practice journalism. A fellow we spent much of the day with absolutely refused to discuss politics and deflected every one of my efforts to raise issues of Moroccan governance or press freedom. He’s a survivor and plans to stay one.
We ended up in Portugal, at the home of an old friend who spent much of his career as a reporter and then senior-level media executive, a retired American who’s now a permanent resident of that country. With his permission I tell this story, although I’m not going to identify him for reasons that will become clear in a moment.
As he drove us to his home and we brought each other up to date on our lives and labors (we worked together in news for about a decade many years ago), he told Louise and me about the new project he’s working on with a loose group of people scattered across several EU countries.
It involves preparing for something that, I confess, hadn’t even been on my conscious radar: helping safely smuggle American reporters and opinion writers — and their families — out of the US in the event of a sudden fascist takeover and press crackdown by a figure openly hostile to reporting like Trump or DeSantis.
That people living in Europe would even consider such a thing as potentially necessary was, for me, a shocking wake-up call about how far America has already gone down the authoritarian road and how clear — from outside our country — this is to those living in nations that have experienced rapid authoritarian transitions in the past.
Just a year before Franco’s death ended formal fascism in Spain, Portugal’s rightwing dictatorship — the longest-lasting one in Europe during the 20th century — was overthrown in 1974 by a military-led leftist coup (the “Carnation Revolution”) which ended press and schoolbook censorship as a first step to guiding the country through a democratic transition.
Today, as a result, Portugal is one of the EU’s more progressive and open nations, particularly with regard to press freedom: they’re number 9 in the world, according to Reporters Without Borders.
There are multiple active networks around the world working to support reporters at risk in repressive regimes; most Americans have heard the stories of hundreds of Russian reporters who fled or were smuggled out of that country after, early last year, President Putin criminalized reporting on his terrorist war against the democracy and citizens of Ukraine.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, for example, has experts and correspondents around the world who support reporters exposing antidemocratic and criminal activity by repressive governments. As their website notes:
“[CPJ] provides comprehensive, life-saving support to journalists and media support staff working around the world through up-to-date safety and security information and rapid response assistance.”
They’re one of multiple organizations working around the world to promote press freedom; many are much smaller and some even operate with no public presence whatsoever, as is the group my friend is currently helping to organize.
The simple reality, known well to the Framers of our Constitution, is that a free, open, and independent press is essential to a functioning democracy. To ensure this in America, in addition to our First Amendment, we had for much of the last century specific laws and rules enhancing press independence, keeping news as news rather than infotainment, and ensuring a broad spectrum of perspectives and ideas were available to the public.
The Fairness Doctrine, for example, which Reagan suspended the enforcement of in 1987 and Barack Obama took off the books in 2011, mandated that when representatives of radio or TV station ownership or management presented opinions on controversial subjects there be equal time given to opposing views.
When I worked in the newsroom of WITL radio and at WJIM TV in Lansing, Michigan during the late 1960s, part of my job was to help find those “opposing voices” who’d record responses to on-air editorials by station management.
The Fairness Doctrine also required us to “program in the public interest,” which was interpreted as having news at the top and bottom of every hour on the radio along with a half-hour to one-hour news block leading into prime time on TV (this was also loosely covered by the “Prime Time Access Rule”).
Back then, news operations lost money; they were the cost of maintaining a radio or TV station license. Starting in 1987, however, they moved under the oversight of network entertainment programming and became profit centers, so nowadays “if it bleeds, it leads.” Clickbait is today more vital to many “news” organizations than information crucial to a functioning democracy, simply because it draws more eyeballs and thus more profit.
Additionally, the Fairness Doctrine required “equal time” be given to candidates for public office, a provision that would have prevented Trump from getting, according to The Street, an estimated “$5.6 billion [in free television coverage] throughout the entirety of his [2016] campaign, more than Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio combined.”
Finally, there were explicit limits on the monopolization of media outlets, known as “media ownership limits.” Some of these were blown up when Bill Clinton signed Newt Gingrich’s Telecommunications Act of 1996, which led to a massive consolidation of newspaper and radio station ownership over the next five years.
Ownership rules were further loosened in 2017 by the Trump administration in a 3-2 FCC vote, with the Republican majority prevailing. Public interest groups sued and it went to the Supreme Court where, in 2021, Brett Kavanaugh, with Clarence Thomas concurring, wrote the Court’s opinion saying:
“The [three Republicans on the] FCC considered the record evidence on competition, localism, viewpoint diversity, and minority and female ownership, and reasonably concluded that the three ownership rules no longer serve the public interest.”
As a result, a handful of right-leaning New York hedge funds and private equity firms now own more than half of all the local newspapers in the US, the CEO of a network with hundreds of stations broadcasting rightwing talk radio 24/7 told me and a US Senator to our faces that he’d never put anybody on any of his stations “who advocates raising my taxes,” and the single largest network of TV stations in the country is owned by the openly and proudly rightwing Sinclair Broadcasting.
There literally is no equivalent national media infrastructure on the left here in the United States. None.
All of this media consolidation that’s happened since the Reagan Revolution makes our overall media landscape much easier to seize, control, and manipulate should our government ever flip fully fascist, as my friend in Portugal fears could happen.
In my opinion, the “soft fascist” model pursued by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is the most likely to prevail here in the US should a Republican win the White House: Orbán simply used his government’s influence to facilitate the takeover of virtually all the consequential media in that nation by a handful of friendly oligarchs, so every radio and TV station in that country now most closely resembles Fox “News” and praises Orbán’s every move, day after day.
One could argue we’re already more than halfway there. When my radio program was carried opposite Rush Limbaugh on Air America, we’d leased 54 radio stations from Clear Channel and broadcast into virtually every major metropolitan area in the US. We did well, had an audience of millions, and I frequently beat Limbaugh in the ratings in our daypart; some suggest without Air America Barack Obama may not have been elected president in 2008.
After Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital private equity firm took over Clear Channel, however, one-by-one we lost our stations as they were flipped to sports programming until Air America no longer had a large enough audience share to support an advertising revenue model and went bankrupt. Virtually every one of those radio “pods” now program rightwing talk radio and the last two to carry my show went rightwing in the past five years.
Thus — lacking a broad and nationally-penetrating progressive radio, TV, and newspaper infrastructure — should a Trump, DeSantis, or other Republican fascist become president and outlaw “fake news” altogether, I and my colleagues may be faced with the choices confronting journalists in other authoritarian nations: leave broadcasting or, for our own safety, even leave the country.
This is the path reporting has taken in Russia, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Brazil, India, Venezuela, Poland, Cuba, The Philippines, Turkey, parts of Mexico, China, Colombia, and Nigeria.
And it’s not like we’re doing well: news media in America is already in crisis.
Reporters Without Bordersranks America 45th in press freedom, far below every other advanced democracy in the world. Other countries with freer and more open news organizations and systems include Tonga, the Dominican Republic, Croatia, Montenegro, Andorra, Cabo Verde, Jamaica, Moldova, South Africa, Costa Rica, Namibia, Samoa, and pretty much every “western” European nation.
The media consolidation scenarios described above account for much of that low position.
Arguably, the transition from a free press to our infotainment/clickbait media today began with media strategies laid out by Reagan and Bush consultants Lee Atwater, Roger Stone, and Putin’s man Paul Manafort. During the 1992 election Rich Bond, then the chairman of the RNC, explained why Republicans had spent the previous twenty years claiming there was a “liberal bias” in the media when there was and is measurably no such thing.
“There is some strategy to it,” Eric Alterman quoted Bond as saying. “If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.”
Four decades of this constant harassment of our media by Republican politicians and their toadies has led to today’s both-sides-ism, where many reporters are afraid to even mention Republican crimes or perfidy unless they can come up with some equivalent — no matter how thin or weak — by Democrats.
Michael Abramowitz, president of Freedom House and a former editor and White House correspondent for The Washington Post, toldNeiman Reports:
“There is no question we are living through a democracy recession. … We are in a very difficult situation and focusing on protecting journalists and their ability to do their jobs safely and helping to make journalism more economically viable is critical to restoring democracy. …
“I think we’re on a terribly dire course right now. All the threats to journalism today are honestly to me so much greater than when I was a journalist. … That’s what the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was all about.”
Across the world, dictators, authoritarians, and wannabee dictators are using Trump’s epithet “fake news” to attack journalists with a vengeance. Turkey recently cracked down on reporters, jailing several, having passed a law that explicitly uses the phrase “fake news.”
Two months ago, on the 30th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day, the United Nations held a conference about this issue of a free press and its necessity to functioning democracies.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the situation was dire:
“Freedom of the press is the foundation of democracy and justice. It gives all of us the facts we need to shape opinions and speak truth to power. But in every corner of the world, freedom of the press is under attack.”
His concerns were echoed by the Publisher of The New York Times, A.G. Sulzberger, who added:
“The Internet also unleashed the avalanche of misinformation, propaganda, punditry and clickbait that now overwhelms our information ecosystem, often drowning out credible journalism and accelerating the decline in societal trust.”
Republican calls for violence against reporters are also getting louder every day. Just this past month Kari Lake threatened our press, saying:
“I have a message tonight for Merrick Garland, and Jack Smith, and Joe Biden. And the guys back there in the fake news media, you should listen up as well, this one’s for you.
“If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me, and you’re going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me.
“And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA. That’s not a threat, that’s a public service announcement.”
Clearly it was a threat, and a threat of violent death at the hands of gun owners.
Meanwhile, Trump and other Republicans have amped up their attacks on the media, including threats of imprisonment and worse directed at journalists, should Republicans seize power in the 2024 election.
From Russian troll farms pumping lies and propaganda directly into American homes via social media, to useful idiots in America who echo them for political gain, to Republican politicians openly calling for an end to a free press in this country, my friend in Portugal may well be onto something.
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Meta Goes 'Nuclear' Over Canadian Online News Act That Ignores Root of Journalism Crisis
Some advocates of the bargaining code model seem focused on punishing Big Tech and "aren't really giving a great deal of thought to what the future of journalism requires," said Tim Karr of Free Press.
Jun 23, 2023
While Meta is under fire for planning to yank journalistic content off Facebook and Instagram in Canada over the Online News Act, some policy experts are criticizing Canadian lawmakers for passing the legislation, arguing that the backlash was predictable plus the law won't adequately address issues with Big Tech or the media industry.
Free Press senior director of strategy and communications Tim Karr on Friday warned of the "real world impacts" of Meta's plans for Canadian users, pointing out that "there are forest fires now raging across parts of Canada," so "having access to news and information could be a matter of life or death for a lot of people."
Karr is also critical of legislation like the new Canadian law, also known as Bill C-18. The optics are "very good for lawmakers," he told Common Dreams in an interview, "but the hard reality is that while it may look good in the papers for them... it does very little to actually get at the root of the problem of the crisis in journalism."
"There are things that Big Tech does that deserve to be punished, but the real goal here is not punishing Big Tech... It is helping save public interest news and information."
After Bill C-18 received royal assent on Thursday, Minister of Canadian Heritage Pablo Rodriguez said in a statement that "a free and independent press is fundamental to our democracy. Thanks to the Online News Act, newsrooms across the country will now be able to negotiate fairly for compensation when their work appears on the biggest digital platforms."
"It levels the playing field by putting the power of Big Tech in check and ensuring that even our smallest news business can benefit through this regime and receive fair compensation for their work," added Rodriguez, who leads the Department of Canadian Heritage—which must now draft regulations related to the law, a process that could take six months or longer.
The department's statement highlighted how the global journalism funding crisis has impacted Canada, noting that 474 outlets have closed in 335 Canadian communities since 2008, a third of industry jobs disappeared across the country from 2010-16, and overall revenue for broadcast television, radio, newspapers, and magazines fell by nearly $6 billion from 2008-20.
Building on a model enacted in Australia two years ago, Bill C-18 is designed to inject money into the news media sector through agreements under which dominant digital platforms—such as Alphabet-owned Google and Meta's Facebook and Instagram—compensate Canadian journalistic outlets for their content. Smaller news outlets will be able to collectively bargain for deals.
When Australia's News Media Bargaining Code took effect in early 2021, Facebook—which changed its parent company name to Meta later that year—initially blocked the content of Australian news outlets, which Amnesty International campaigner Tim O'Connor at the time called an "extremely concerning" decision that "demonstrates why allowing one company to exert such dominant power over our information ecosystem threatens human rights."
The tech giant reversed course within a week—and despite Wall Street Journal reporting last June that "Facebook is reexamining its commitment to paying for news," the voluntary agreements in Australia have so far held up. According to a December report from the Australian government, Meta and Google have inked more than 30 deals with the nation's news outlets.
"At least some of these agreements have enabled news businesses to, in particular, employ additional journalists and make other valuable investments to assist their operations," says the Australian report. "While views on the success or otherwise of the code will invariably differ, we consider it is reasonable to conclude that the code has been a success to date."
Whether such deals will materialize in Canada remains to be seen, but the technology companies have fiercely opposed Bill C-18. The Toronto Star noted that "earlier this year, Google quietly launched a test designed to filter out news content on its search engine for a small percentage of its Canadian users. Meta followed suit in June, conducting a test that is still ongoing and limits news sharing for some of its users."
Google spokesperson Jenn Crider said Thursday that "we're doing everything we can to avoid an outcome that no one wants. Every step of the way, we've proposed thoughtful and pragmatic solutions that would have improved the bill and cleared the path for us to increase our already significant investments in the Canadian news ecosystem. So far, none of our concerns have been addressed. Bill C-18 is about to become law and remains unworkable. We are continuing to urgently seek to work with the government on a path forward."
Meta, meanwhile, chose what Karr—a critic of both the bargaining code model and Big Tech—called the "nuclear option," and confirmed Thursday that "news availability will be ended on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada" before the law takes effect.
Rodriguez responded that "Facebook knows very well that they have no obligations under the act right now. Following royal assent of Bill C-18, the government will engage in a regulatory and implementation process. If the government can't stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?"
The American Economic Liberties Project tweeted Friday that "Meta's back on its blackmail routine, but Canadian lawmakers know better," echoing Erik Peinert, the group's research manager and editor, who had similarly praised the country's policymakers a day earlier.
"Canadian lawmakers stepped up today to save news outlets that are being eaten alive by Big Tech's business model of monetizing their content with no compensation," Peinert said in a Thursday statement. "Similar legislation has already restored Australia's news landscape, injecting millions into the industry to support a new generation of journalists and strengthen democracy."
Rather than applauding Canadian lawmakers, critics like Karr and professor Michael Geist, the Canada research chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, suggested that they "have made an epic miscalculation."
Meta's move "was both predictable and entirely avoidable," considering that the company "never strayed from the position that the bill rendered Canadian news uneconomic on its platforms and that it would stop news sharing in response," according to Geist.
As he wrote Friday on Substack:
News is not a significant part of Facebook feeds (the company says about 3%) and it is highly substitutable (users spend the same amount of time on the platform whether presented with news links or photos of friends). But it is important to many news outlets, who told the Senate studying the bill that it provides between 17-30% of their traffic. This is particularly true for small, independent, and digital-first outlets that often rely on social media to develop readership and establish community. Losing those free referral links will have a damaging effect on those news outlets and undermine competition, leading to reduced traffic, less ad revenue, and fewer subscribers. Indeed, the publishers know the value of Facebook since they are the ones that post the majority of links to their own articles. Tough talk from Rodriguez will be cold comfort for those who have lost those links and lost revenues due to government policy.
"Had the government listened to anyone other than media lobbyists, it would have considered alternatives such as a fund model that would have avoided payments for links, concerns about press independence, as well as risks to trade and copyright obligations," Geist added. "But in a process that initially even tried to exclude Meta from appearing before committee, there was no room for dissenting views. And now there will be no room for Canadian news on the world's leading social media platform as part of the government's made-in-Canada internet."
This week's developments in Canada could inform debates about such bills elsewhere, including in the United States. Peinert on Thursday urged U.S. lawmakers considering the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), to "follow Australia and Canada's lead." Anti-monopoly campaigners have also welcomed a similar bill by California state lawmakers.
Karr has warned against measures like the JCPA and the new Canadian law. He noted Friday that "Free Press is no fan of big social media companies and we spend a good portion of our time advocating against a lot of the things that companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google do."
"But it feels to me oftentimes that the impetus of the support for the bargaining code bills in Australia, Canada, and the United States is merely to punish Big Tech—and, of course, there are things that Big Tech does that deserve to be punished, but the real goal here is not punishing Big Tech," he stressed. "It is helping save public interest news and information... creating a model that subsidizes the type of news production, local news in particular, accountability journalism, that has gone missing as a result of the implosion of the news industry."
It is no longer "economically viable for local newspapers to operate on the model that they've been operating on for the last century," Karr told Common Dreams. "Unless we take a serious look at the shifting economics of news production and create legislation meant to address that, we're going to just be kind of bailing water out of a sinking ship." However, he argued, advocates of bargaining bills "aren't really giving a great deal of thought to what the future of journalism requires."
With the Australian code, "there isn't a lot of transparency" regarding negotiations, because it's not legally mandated, and "Google and Facebook initially struck deals with some of the consolidated outlets there," he explained. The approach pursued by Australia and Canada "favors large and often very profitable news organizations while disadvantaging smaller news organizations that might be serving minority communities or other niche populations."
It also creates "this kind of clickbait gold rush where you have outlets just trying to put items in social media that generate a lot of clicks and a lot of traffic so that they can go back to these platforms and ask for a lot of money," he warned.
Australia and Canada's laws advanced in part because "legacy media outlets have been very aggressive in lobbying... because they know it just lines their pockets," Karr said. "That's been our main complaint about the JCPA and other bargaining code bills, is that they're the wrong solution... to the crisis in journalism. In fact, they kind of ignore the crisis."
Passing such policies not only fails to address problems such as news deserts, "it actually sets us back because... lawmakers have limited bandwidth for all of the issues that they have to deal with," he argued. Because "there is a political desire to do something about these very powerful tech companies," these measures allow lawmakers "to check that box while at the same time saying that they're doing something to help save journalism."
One alternative is creating an independent fund for public interest journalism. For the United States specifically, "Free Press has proposed an ad tax that would be levied on online advertising revenues," Karr detailed Thursday at Tech Policy Press. "A 1% tax would generate around $2 billion annually—which would fund a public interest media endowment that would place a premium on funding civic engagement and accountability journalism over clickbait and disinformation."
"Unlike the JCPA, it wouldn't rely on a convoluted bargaining code that's built on a false understanding of the news business," he wrote. "Instead, this approach recognizes the actual economics of news, treats journalism as a public good, and creates a structure through which funds actually support the production and distribution of news and information that are needed most."
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