Is Sinclair Group Right or Wrong?

[MODU]

I don't particularily care.  The movie is a bad idea.  The company has any right to do what it wants.

[MODU]

In science class, I once had to make a working mini-car out of a mouse trap. My car kept veering to the left whenever I'd start it. I put a rock on one side to balance it out, and it seemed to run fine. My teacher walked up and took the rock off.

"You can't have this rock on there," he said.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because it doesn't really fix anything," he replied.

He was right. I wasn't fixing the problem, just balancing it out in an unnatural way. And so goes media coverage. Using the "the mainstream media is biased, so why can't Sinclair be?" is a poor argument. The best way to fix media bias is not with opposing media bias.

It can be argued until one is blue that network coverage does just as much harm to Bush as this movie would do to Kerry, but the fact remains that if we want to get rid of bias, further media polarization is not the way.

Hence the reason I don't watch network news, and rarely ever watch any of their programming.  Besides, cable has so many better programs to begin with.

[MODU]

I did some looking into this over the evening last night.  Sinclair's networks do not cover all of the US, but only specific areas.  Additionally, they are not major network channels, but side channels like UHF.  Most of their programming is sindication, so it is unlikely they are displacing a normally scheduled "new" program to run this film which they bought (just like NBC buying "Twister" or some other movie to show).  So no one is going to be impacted by the scheduling of this show.

Now going back to my original statement, I think it's a dumb idea.  However, it doesn't seem to be illegal.  If this was a mainstream network, such as CBS or NBC, then my view would be different, since in some regions, those are the only stations you can receive.