The Sinclair Precedent

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

You read it here first. The precedent being set by liberals in the campaign to silence the Sinclair broadcasting empire in its effort to air a documentary on Senator Kerry’s agitation against the Vietnam War is going to be used, eventually, against the New York Times and the Washington Post Company and the other big holders of newspapers and television franchises who failed to come to Sinclair’s defense. If a shareholders suit or advertising boycott can be drummed up, or even threatened, over an unpopular editorial decision at a broadcasting system, why not over an unpopular editorial decision at a newspaper. We can’t prove it will happen, we don’t want it to happen, but it’s our prediction.


There are, of course, honest liberals in the land. Watching the outcry against Sinclair we found ourselves recalling a wonderful op-ed piece that Governor Cuomo wrote for the New York Times back in 1993 under the headline, “The Unfairness Doctrine.” At the time legislation was pending in the Congress to revive the so-called “fairness doctrine,” which had been toppled during the Reagan years when the country was beginning to grasp the number of broadcasting outlets that were going to be available in an America in the age of cable and superstations and the like. The law being contemplated, Mr. Cuomo noted, would require every radio and TV station to “afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views on issues of public importance.”


The governor objected on First Amendment grounds and noted that no one would have dared suggest a similar rule for newspapers, magazines, or movies. He called such an idea “unthinkable,” like, he said, a law requiring Oliver Stone to produce a more “balanced” film on the Kennedy assassination or forcing theaters to offset “JFK” with films depicting alternative accounts of the events. He laced into such leaders as Senator Hollings and Congressmen Dingell and Markey, who would countenance what the governor called “analogous intrusion into radio and TV.” He argued that “precisely because radio and TV have become our principal sources of news and information, we should accord broadcasters the utmost freedom…” Mr. Cuomo himself would soon become a budding radio talk show host, and a brilliant one at that.


In the case of Sinclair broadcasting, we have seen the film, “Stolen Honor,” that it has said it will air parts of in the coming campaign. It’s a devastating portrait of what several Americans who had been held as war prisoners in Hanoi think of Mr. Kerry’s activities in the movement against the Vietnam War. At least one of the former POWs interviewed for the film holds the Medal of Honor. Our own view is that Sinclair would be doing a great public service to America if it aired the entire film. But even if one doesn’t take that view, it’s hard to see the logic of trying to stifle Sinclair’s right to do so. A decade ago, Mr. Cuomo warned of the chilling effect of the fairness doctrine. What a spectacle it is to see liberals, a decade later, ignore the warnings issued so eloquently at a time when the passion of politics was finally, for the first time, making it onto the air.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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