How Baltimore Locals Beat A Right-Wing Media Tycoon

And told him to F on off!

Photo by Hayden Walker on Unsplash

Pardon us while we recalibrate our humor from “breezy” to “gallows.” We woke up in a world that’s post-shame, post-rule-of-law, where feelings don’t care about your facts, and Taylor Swift’s next album will probably be two hours of dirges. But giving up is not allowed!

Yelling at the Washington Post, LA Times, and New York Times for a decade of ridiculous both-sides-ing is a worthy activity, but who besides us even reads the papers any more? Half of Americans get their news from social media, and mostly from Elon’s hellsite, followed by Facebook and YouTube. Fox News is the most-watched news channel. Is it any wonder that Republicans falsely believe crime and unauthorized border crossings are at an all-time high, and the stock market is sinking? And most Americans don’t “follow the news” at all; in 2022 people who said they follow the news reached an all-time low of 38 percent. With social media, though, the news follows you!

Doing reporting costs money, but lies are free. The truth is complicated and grey-area, lies and slogans are easy to convey. Especially when they’re subsidized by Russia and billionaires, who are not in the habit of investing in news sources working against their own self-interests. Inflammatory content gets shared, shoved into your algorithms, and within hours of interacting or blocking, as the case may be, you’re in an echo chamber. How can the Left compete with this?

Maybe there’s a lesson in Baltimore, which has united to tell a local right-wing media tycoon to FUCK RIGHT OFF. 

The tycoon’s name is David D. Smith, and he’s a real corker! A nepo baby, his father Julian founded the Sinclair Broadcast Group in Cockeysville, Maryland, and David took it over, growing it to be the second-largest owner of local stations in the country, now owning or affiliated with 294 stations in 89 markets. 

Would you be surprised to hear the guy is a horny hypocrite and adjudicated pervert? Before joining the family business, David sold bootleg pornography in Baltimore’s red light district, The Block, just for fun. And the same time the local Fox 45 channel was having a breathless conniption about Baltimore being a crime-ridden craphole, their CEO was getting arrested in the city for “committing a perverted sex act” in a company-owned Mercedes. Namely, getting a blowjob from a sex worker while driving up the interstate, which sounds dangerous! Then he had his employees do his community service for him.

Sinclair’s growth formula was simple: Buy up independent channels, provide less local news coverage, provide centrally packaged national political coverage, more wrestling, and pump the right-wingery. In 2004 Sinclair pulled a segment of “Nightline” with Ted Koppel reading the names of American casualties in Iraq, and forced stations to play “Stolen Honor,” aka The Swiftboating of John Kerry. 

Smith would love it if Trump would get rid of the FCC, and allow him to take the next step from tycoon to oligarch. “We are here to deliver your message,” he slobbered to Trump in 2016. And he’s tried to oligarch locally first, buying up The Baltimore Sun, the local newspaper of record, and scrubbing it of the story of his arrest, plus most of its reporters, and all of its feature coverage. 

But, enter the Baltimore Banner, and local philanthropist Stewart W. Bainum Jr., chairman of Choice Hotels. He tried to buy the Sun and was thwarted, and so he started his own news source, an all-digital nonprofit. He hired the LA Times’ former managing editor Kimi Yoshino as editor-in-chief, raided the Sun of its most beloved journalists, like Justin Fenton and Julie Scharper, and former reporters from the Wall Street Journal, like Julie Bykowicz, and former editor of Annapolis’s Capital Gazette, Rick Hutzell. They partnered with the local NPR affiliate, and the local CBS affiliate.

The staff grew to 125, with 80 reporters, and the circulation grew to 44,000, beating the Sun’s last reported daily circulation of 43,000. The Banner did it by focusing not on the local bleed-leads, but the hyper-local, the interesting: a mysterious coffin that appeared in Wyman Park, the ravenous asshole ponies of Assateague Island, the goings-on of the City Council, the appearance of brown boobies on Chesapeake channel markers. They brought in local creatives-in-residence, like D. Watkins. It’s a news source that feels like it really gets you, because it does, the reporters actually live here, and they aren’t repackaging wire copy. And yes, subscribing costs money, but you can also subscribe for free through the library.

David D. Smith recently tried to test his newly purchased power in Baltimore, using his own money to try to pass a ballot initiative to shrink the size of the City Council. It became the first ballot initiative to fail in the city 25 years. People close to the most-loved mayor formed the “Stop Sinclair Committee,” and labor unions like the Baltimore Fire Officers donated. And even with half as much funding, they beat the ballot initiative. Newspapers once stood for credibility, but in Baltimore, the Smith name has become poo on a stick.

Could such models be replicated elsewhere? Local coalition-building that drives away the people who want to weaken and divide us?

It’s worth a ponder!