A recent commentary in which Sinclair’s Mark Hyman takes other journalists to task for ethical failings goes about as well as one might expect it to, given what viewers have long seen from Hyman himself.
The subject is an article in Politico from many months ago that quoted Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner as saying that the Trump campaign had struck a deal with Sinclair for interviews with the candidate.
(That Hyman is rehashing news from more than half a year ago is odd, although it’s at least possible it might have to do with the fact that between the recent John Oliver piece on Sinclair and rising objections to Sinclair’s attempt to purchase yet more TV stations—some even coming from fellow conservative media outlets—the company is feeling under siege.)
Hyman claims Politico—and several other news outlets that picked up the story—misrepresented the deal. The problem is that Hyman himself mischaracterizes the Politico piece, implying that it ignored information that “any fresh-faced reporter” could have found for political purposes.
Specifically, he suggests that the Politico piece suggested Sinclair made a deal with only the Trump campaign and did not offer the same deal to the Clinton campaign. He cites a retraction/apology from a blog written by a member of the Society for Professional Journalists who had based an earlier post on the Politico piece as outside, confirming evidence of malfeasance.
Indeed, he charges Politico with turning down Sinclair’s offer of emails showing that the same offer had been made to both candidates. “What’s that say about Politico’s agenda?” an appalled Hyman asks.
The underlying rhetorical sleight-of-hand at work is the straw man fallacy. Hyman attacks Politico et al. for claiming something that they never claimed.
Hyman says:
"Politico first reported that President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner claimed the campaign “struck a deal” with Sinclair. That characterization was mindlessly echoed by countless outlets including The New York Times, Washington Post, The Hill, Salon, The Nation and others."
(BTW, let’s table for the moment the appalling lack of the Oxford comma in that final sentence.)
He goes on to say:
“But what they didn’t report was that Sinclair made identical offers to both Trump and Hillary Clinton for campaign coverage.”
This is untrue, and obviously so. In fact, not only does the Politico article report that such offers were made, but they quote a Sinclair vice president as the source of this information. They even mention that the Democratic vice presidential candidate did some interviews. Here is the relevant passage from the Politico piece:
“Scott Livingston, vice president of news at Sinclair, said the offer for extended interviews with local anchors was made to both candidates. Trump did a handful of interviews, while Sen. Tim Kaine did a few as well, though Hillary Clinton did not.”
As Hyman himself might say, “any fresh-faced reporter” could have actually read the Politico article and seen this passage.
As for the apology from the blog writer for the Society of Professional Journalists, it should be noted that the apology was not for attacking Sinclair for making a cushy offer to the Trump campaign and not to Clinton—the writer never made that accusation because the original Politico article never suggested that happened.
Rather, the writer attacked the practice of offering candidates unfettered opportunities to pontificate in interviews with no editorial/journalistic discretion on the part of the journalists doing the interviews. When the blogger received information from Sinclair that suggested the offer of interviews did not totally turn over the reins of the interview to the candidates themselves, he apologized.
However, this apology pointedly did not say that Politico had misreported the facts; rather it was that the third-party sources who were the only people who witnessed Kushner’s comments mischaracterized the nature of the arrangement. Politico accurately summarized what they said; it’s simply that the sources of the information were themselves potentially distorting Kushner’s comments, which themselves were apparently a distortion of the facts around the arrangement Sinclair offered the candidates.
And this is something that even Sinclair grants. In a press release that Hyman himself links to in the online version of his commentary, the author, John Solomon, says, “I don’t fault Politico or the Post for treating Kushner’s comments as news. I don’t fault Kushner for saying what he said.”
Sinclair’s beef, apparently, is that it wasn’t enough for Politico to simply quote a Sinclair vice president or report that Tim Kaine had participated in the interviews as well as Trump. They should have done more to emphasize that, despite Kushner’s characterization, there was nothing in the offer that was meant to assist Trump at the cost of Clinton.
Note that whatever slim merits this argument might have, it is a far more subtle point than the one Hyman makes. Hyman both made demonstrably false statements about the original Politico piece and utterly missed (or misrepresented) the nature of the underlying issue. And as for Politico’s lack of interest in the Sinclair emails, it was presumably because Sinclair was trying to counter a claim that Politico never actually made.
Whether this was “awfully incompetent” or “awfully dishonest” is a question to ponder, perhaps with the important context that Sinclair has apparently gone “all in” on the Trump presidency, with the hopes of getting a deal to buy more stations under the auspices of the Trump-appointee-led FCC (an appointee whom Sinclair has apparently lobbied at great expense).
This is in addition to the longstanding, highly conservative editorial content that any Sinclair-station viewer has become quite familiar with for well over a decade.
If one were of a mind to be cynical, one might suspect that Sinclair itself has joined the Trumpian/conservative war on the press, even to the extent of pretending to act as journalistic watchdog while attacking others in the news business under false pretenses.
And one might find this possibility especially plausible when apprised of the fact that a Sinclair Vice President, Frederick G. Smith, gave a $1000 donation to the Montana politician who body slammed a newspaper reporter, and the donation was given the day after this attack was reported.
Awful indeed.
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