HORRORS: Conservative Purchases Baltimore Sun

On January 20, the New York Times Business Section reported the widespread distress being expressed by staff at the Baltimore Sun following news that the paper had been purchased by conservative Maryland businessman David P. Smith. Desperate to avoid seeing the paper be acquired by a hedge fund, the Times reports, Sun staffers had previously issued a public appeal for a local entrepreneur to buy the paper instead – but it seems that Mr. Smith, although local, wasn’t the sort of purchaser the staff had in mind.

The Sun has suffered in recent years from declining readership and advertising revenue (along with most newspapers), causing the paper and its sister publications to cut their number of editorial employees from 500 to 150. But the remaining staff were notably more upset with the prospect of Smith owning the paper than with the paper’s woeful fiscal condition.

According to the Times, both current and former Sun employees expressed “alarm” that the new owner “will impose his political interests” on “a once proud newspaper.” Smith, it turns out, is the executive chairman of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a media conglomerate that owns nearly 300 local television stations, including Baltimore’s Fox News affiliate.

The Times worriedly reminded readers of reports that Smith had pledged to Donald Trump in 2016 that Sinclair’s stations would deliver his “message,” and had required stations to run promos echoing Trump’s attacks on the news media for bias in 2018.

Media bias? Well, that accusation brings to mind a 2020 controversy that led to the forced resignation of James Bennet from his position as editorial page editor of the Times itself. Bennet had made the cardinal journalistic error of running a column by Arkansas’s distinguished Republican senator, Tom Cotton, calling for the use of the National Guard to suppress the Antifa/Black Lives Matter race riots in 2020 if they could not be successfully subdued by local and state police.

As Bennet recalled in a recent account of the Times incident for The Economist, where he now serves as a columnist, the Times itself “had published pieces arguing against the idea of relying on troops to stop the violence, and one urging abolition of the police altogether” in response to the death of George Floyd. But as Bennet explains, in the Times’s Opinion section, “we were pursuing our role of presenting debate from all sides.” Hence, alongside the pieces defending the rioters, he decided to publish the column by Cotton, an Army veteran.

That decision, Bennet reports, caused “some Times reporters and other staff” to turn immediately to Twitter to attack the decision to publish Cotton’s argument, “for fear he would persuade Times readers to support his proposal and it would be enacted.” Indeed, the next day, the Times’s union issued a statement “calling the op-ed ‘a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent.’”

In response, after initially defending the op-ed, the Times published a lengthy editor’s note expressing regret for running the piece, saying it “fell short of our standards.” And following initial expressions of support for Bennet’s decision to publish it from the Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, and Baquet’s superior, publisher A.G. Sulzberger, Bennet was forced to resign only three days letter.

As Bennet recalls, when he told Sulzberger about a conservative columnist’s concerns that the Times held conservative arguments to a more scrupulous standard than liberal ones, Sulzberger “lost his patience” and told Bennet to “inform the complaining conservative that that’s just how it was: There was a double standard and he should get used to it.”

In the same essay, Bennet cites a subsequent claim by Sulzberger in Politico, in response to Bennet’s lament of the Times’s increasingly intolerant “culture,” that while “James Bennet and I have always agreed on the importance of independent journalism, the challenges it faces in today’s more polarized world, and the mission of the Times to pursue independence even when the path of less resistance might be to give into partisan passion, where I parted ways with him is on how to deliver on these values. Principles alone are not enough. Execution matters. Leadership matters.”

Although Sulzberger has more recently insisted in the Columbia Journalism Review on his continuing dedication to press freedom, it is hard to take seriously his definition of “leadership” as, apparently, caving to the will of a group of staff activists. Indeed, far from retaining any commitment to journalistic objectivity, Sulzberger recalls that when “Trump won the presidency, many Times staff members” were both “scared” and “angry,” having assumed that their employer “was supposed to help lead the resistance.”

Back to the Sun. John McIntyre, an editor at the paper for 34 years, is quoted by the Times as fearing that Smith, the paper’s new owner, will “turn” the paper into “a megaphone for right-wing disinformation and contempt for the city of Baltimore,” just as he has allegedly done with Baltimore’s Fox station.

Smith, however, insists that he purchased the paper for a considerable sum in the hope not only of earning a profit (which would make it desirable to preserve the paper’s respectability) but to serve the public interest. To that end, he pledges that the paper will pursue “balance” in its news coverage.

Smith’s own recent political activities in Baltimore, as reported in the Sun, hardly make him sound like the far-right extremist the Sun’s employees make him out to be. For instance, he donated $100,000 to a PAC supporting the mayoral campaign of Sheila Dixon, a Democrat and former mayor who is running against the incumbent on a campaign emphasizing reducing crime, improving education (including by advocating for charter schools and school choice), and quality-of-life issues.

Smith is also reportedly involved in financing a ballot question that would halve the size of the Baltimore City Council, and previously contributed heavily to a ballot question that established term limits for the mayor, city councilors, and comptroller. The question passed overwhelmingly and was enacted into law.

But none of this seems to matter to the Sun’s employees, nor their sympathetic listeners in the rest of the corporate media. According to the media columnist for the leftist Guardian, as quoted by the Times, while “one often hears the wish for more local ownership” of newspapers “because national vulture-capital chains have done so much damage,” the Sun purchase shows that “local ownership can be just as bad.”

In its final paragraph on the Sun controversy, the Times also quotes a “media executive and filmmaker” who serves on the board of a newly established rival paper, the Baltimore Banner, and describes Smith as an ignorant “Grim Reaper” who will inevitably lead to the Sun’s “undignified death.” What else could one expect from a Republican?

It hardly bears emphasizing how the Sun and Times stories bear out widespread reports of media bias, all of which is likely to drive readers away from print journalism entirely, and toward far less reliable sources—that is, unsubstantiated rumors or gossip that they pick up on the internet.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, at College of the Holy Cross.