Letter to Sinclair Broadcasting:  37 Cents.  Taking Back Our Airwaves:  Priceless

Ted Remington (above) is seen by many as a pioneer in the campaign to expose Sinclair Broadcasting’s corporate excess.  This guest opinion, which appeared in the Iowa City Press-Citizen on June 4, 2004, made many eastern Iowans aware for the first time that a local station, KGAN,  was owned by a huge media conglomerate, the already-notorious Sinclair Broadcasting -  the company that refused to allow its local stations to air Ted Koppel’s “The Fallen.”  To start off Blog for Iowa’s Focus on the Media Week, here is Ted’s landmark piece.
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Individual and PAC contributions by Sinclair Broadcasting Group executives to Republicans:  Nearly $250,000.

The opportunity to foist off canned editorials on eastern Iowans from half a continent away:  Priceless.

If you flip by KGAN at about 10:30 on any given night, you’ll see someone named Mark Hyman delivering his daily editorial, “The Point,” at the tail end of the nightly newscast.  Hyman is not a journalist.  He’s not a KGAN employee.  He’s not even an Iowan.  So why is he prattling away on our airwaves?

The simple answer to that is because he can.  Hyman is the vice president of Sinclair Broadcasting Group Inc., a Baltimore-based company that aims to do to local news what Wal-Mart did to local shopping:  offer low-cost, low-quality products in homogenous outlets across the country to maximize profit.  Sinclair owns or operates 62 local television stations across the country, including Iowa stations KGAN, KFXA, KFSB and KDSM.  

Part of Sinclair’s modus operandi is to gut local news operations and replace them with a one-size-fits-all broadcast.  In many markets, much of the “local” news is actually created in Sinclair’s studios in Baltimore, beamed to its stations, and presented as homegrown product.

No longer homegrown

Thus far, Iowa viewers have been spared the worst of Sinclair’s excesses, but we’ve hardly gone untouched.  If you’ve noticed that Tiffany O’Donnell anchors not only KGAN’s 10 p.m. news but also the 9 p.m. newscast on KFXA and KFXB, you’ve seen Sinclair’s handiwork.  And if business takes you to Des Moines and you feel a little homesick, just tune in to KDSM’s nightly newscast, hosted by your “local” news anchor, the indefatigable Tiffany O’Donnell.

Has O’Donnell conquered the laws of time and space in order to hold down three anchoring jobs simultaneously?  Not exactly.  Sinclair uses its stable of  KGAN talent to create a generic newscast that is shown on KFXA, KFXB and KDSM.  The good people of Dubuque have suffered most from this news cloning.  The city no longer has a newscast of its own but must do with the generic Sinclair-cast that pays virtually no attention to stories of particular interest in Dubuque.  For all intents and purposes, KFXB no longer is a local station.

Once upon a time, Sinclair could not have pulled this off.  Media ownership regulations ensured that no single company ran multiple television stations in the same market.  But the current incarnation of the Federal Communications Commission, with the approval of anti-regulation crusaders in the White House and Congress, relaxed these restrictions, delighting companies such as Sinclair, which can now scoop up multiple stations at will.

And this brings us back to the droit du seigneur that is “The Point.”  Not content to merely profit from owning scores of television stations, Sinclair’s executives use the rights of ownership to compel stations such as KGAN to run their prefab political editorials.  Regardless of how out of step such commentaries might be with the views and concerns of local viewers in specific markets, all Sinclair-owned stations must submit and provide Hyman access to their audience.

It’s true that Hyman’s editorials are predictably conservative, far to the right of the average KGAN viewer.  But that shouldn’t surprise anyone.  Given that republican politicians and appointees spearheaded media deregulation, one can understand why Sinclair’s views (and money) support GOP concerns almost exclusively.  But that’s not the problem.

It’s also the case that Hyman’s ramblings rarely rise above the level of talk-radio blather, relying on name calling, hyperbole and shading of the truth to create what passes for an “argument.”  But that’s not my primary concern, either.

Not an Iowa Discussion

What should concern all of us in eastern Iowa is that Sinclair, a corporate conglomerate based on the east coast, is exploiting a local resource.  If KGAN wants to take a right-wing editorial stance, that’s fine.  If KGAN decides to allot precious minutes of airtime to the musings of a mid-level management type rather than a bona fide journalist, that’s its prerogative.  But “The Point” isn’t a KGAN product.  It’s the brainchild of a corporation as far away from eastern Iowa in temperament and values as it is in geography.

We the people own the public airwaves, not KGAN, Mark Hyman or Sinclair Broadcasting Group.  I, for one, would welcome greater use of local broadcast time for the discussion of topical issues, but let it be a truly local discussion.  Let’s talk about school board elections, local referendums and proposed city ordinances.  Let’s talk about who we want to represent us in Des Moines and Washington.  And when we discuss national and international issues, let’s do it with an Iowan accent.

“The Point” represents a misuse of a public resource, a resource too scarce to be given away.  Certainly, there are larger issues of media conglomeration that bode ill for truly local news, and these issues need to be addressed.

But let’s begin the fight here.  Write KGAN (Sinclair Broadcasting Group Inc., 10706 Beaver Dam Road, Hunt Valley, Md., 21030) and ask them to stand up for their viewers by standing up to their bosses in Baltimore.  Better yet, write directly to the Sinclair company and tell it you will not watch its programming as long as it takes advantage of their clients:  us.

Sending a letter to Sinclair Broadcasting Group:  37 cents.

Getting back our public airwaves:  Priceless.
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Ted Remington is an assistant professor of English and associate director of writing at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He holds a Ph.D. in communication studies from The University of Iowa, where he specialized in rhetorical studies.  He has written articles and presented papers on a range of topics, including using the Internet to teach writing, the political rhetoric of marginalized groups, and the role of rhetorical critics as political activists. He is also the author of the weblog "The Counterpoint," which features near-daily refutations of "The Point."