Has only read paper four times in recent months
First, if you didn’t know already, Sinclair Broadcasting is based in Baltimore, David Folkenflik reminds Threads readers:
Post by @davidfolkenflikView on Threads
About David D. Smith, Judd Legum adds:
Smith is the son of Sinclair founder Julian Sinclair Smith and, along with his brothers, controls the company. Sinclair, a publicly traded company, owns or operates 185 local television stations across 86 markets. A 2018 study published in the American Political Science Review found that stations purchased by Sinclair “coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics” and undergo “a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage.”
Smith is the executive chairman of Sinclair Inc., reports the startup Baltimore Banner.
[Smith] told New York Magazine in 2018 he considered print media “so left-wing as to be meaningless dribble.” Asked Tuesday during the meeting whether he stood by those comments now that he owns one of the most storied titles in American journalism, Smith said yes. Asked if he felt that way about the contents of his newspaper, Smith said “in many ways, yes,” according to people at the meeting.
Folkenflik again:
Smith said he paid nine figures, a seemingly staggering sum. (Bezos paid $250M for the WashPost.)
Unclear if the undisclosed figure includes the licensing fees required by Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that sold the Sun. Smith will rely on Alden’s CMS and other services.
Smith announced the Sun was profitable and that he’d make it more profitable. He mocked Bezos, saying he didn’t intend to lose $50M a year on the paper.
(The Amazon founder is losing more than that.)
Smith was dismissive of the Sun’s journalism, saying it wasn’t publishing enough stories that readers were interested in, saying there was fraud in local government and schools.
And he pointed repeatedly to Sinclair’s local station WBFF’s flashy reports “Project Baltimore.”
The Sun won a Pulitzer in 2020 for exposing “a lucrative, undisclosed financial relationship between the city’s mayor and the public hospital system she helped to oversee.”
The new Sun owner deflected questions about his own political activities, calling himself apolitical.
Smith has been a major funder of GOP candidates; more recently he has funded far-right outfits like Project Veritas and Turning Point USA & financed local ballot initiatives.
Former Republican campaign operative Tim Miller observes, “This feels like a scene from a bad TV movie. Evil rich guy buys newspaper, announces to staff he doesn’t read and wants more racist cartoons.”
David Simon, former Sun reporter and co-creator of “The Wire,” responded on Formerly Twitter:
While never a paid employee, I wrote many op-eds for the local paper. I enjoyed having an editor to keep me from making stupid errors of grammar and usage. Since being bought by Gannett, the editorial staff I worked with is gone, the reporting staff has been slashed, the printing plant was shuttered, and my “local” paper is printed in another state.
For local investigative reporting, we now have the free, not-for-profit Asheville Watchdog, a hobby project of a band of retired journalists, mainly “unpaid part-time volunteers.” They include several Pulitzer winners & finalists, many from major Florida outlets and others from The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, and The Financial Times of London.
This is what we’ve come to. Locally, at least, we are blessed.