David Smith makes Rupert Murdoch look like a piker:
...To understand what kind of journalism the Bush administration expects from these companies, you need only look at those that are already its collaborators. Fox News speaks loudly for itself, to the point of posting on its Web site an article by its chief political correspondent containing fictional John Kerry quotes. (After an outcry, it was retracted as 'written in jest.') But Fox is just the tip of the Rupert Murdoch empire. When The New York Post covered the release of the report by the C.I.A.'s chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, it played the story on page 8 and didn't get to the clause 'while no stockpiles of W.M.D. were found in Iraq' until the 16th paragraph. This would be an Onion parody were it not deadly serious...If you read nothing else online today, go read Frank Rich's column in the New York Times.
...What you're seeing on your TV screens," the president said when minimizing the Iraq insurgency in May, are "the desperate tactics of a hateful few." Maybe that's the sunny news that can be found on a Sinclair station. Now, with our election less than three weeks away, the bad news coming out of Iraq everywhere else is a torrent. Reporters at virtually every news organization describe a downward spiral so dangerous that they can't venture anywhere in Iraq without risking their lives. Last weekend marines spoke openly and by name to Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post about the quagmire they're witnessing firsthand and its irrelevance to battling Al Qaeda, whose 9/11 attack motivated many of them to enlist in the first place...
Update, 11AM EDT: Joe Gandelman has a spot-on rant up at The Moderate Voice. As Joe notes, the Sinclair Broadcast Group issue is NOT about Bush or Kerry: it's about a line being crossed.
The Sinclair boycott bandwagon continues to gather steam...
