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My biggest surprise: He kept a straight face.
That was my reaction Monday night, watching Sinclair Broadcast Group vice president Mark Hyman defend the company's decision to air a commercial-free documentary Oct. 21 based on dubious criticisms of John Kerry's Vietnam War-era protests days before the presidential election.
"This is a very topical newsworthy issue that has just made itself available," said Hyman, chief lobbyist for the company, with no hint of a snicker.
Viewers know Hyman better as the man fronting "The Point," a nightly series of caustic, right-leaning commentaries that Sinclair's 62 stations are also required to air (in one, he urged the government to "crack down on illegal aliens before they vote to take away your rights"; in another, he searched Iraq for all the good news mainstream the media weren't reporting).
"Nobody else is covering this," said Hyman of Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal, a documentary alleging that Kerry's claims of U.S. atrocities during the Vietnam War - abuses documented by later investigations - led the Viet Cong to torture American POWs. "The rest of the news industry is acting like Holocaust deniers and pretending as if these guys don't exist."
It may be true that Stolen Honor, a documentary assembled by journalist Carlton Sherwood, is a newsworthy look at the impact of Kerry's antiwar statements. Even if Sherwood, a decorated Vietnam veteran who later won a Pulitzer Prize among a team of reporters at Gannett News Service, also has faced allegations he allowed the Unification Church's founder, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, to unduly influence a book he wrote on Moon's legal troubles after working at his conservative newspaper, the Washington Times.
But is Hyman, a guy paid to deliver opinions for Sinclair on a regular basis, the best executive available to make the case for objective journalism?
Indeed, the only thing more absurd than Sinclair trying to pretend this isn't a last-minute sucker punch to Kerry is the Democratic National Committee petitioning the Federal Election Commission to rule the broadcast an in-kind donation to President Bush's campaign.
That would require federal officials to determine whether a Stolen Honor special can be defined as news. Think about that one for a minute.
While you're thinking, consider that Hyman's claims of mainstream media outlets ignoring Carlton's documentary are also hogwash, as a look at stories on Stolen Honor weeks ago by MSNBC, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Boston Globe, CNBC and other outlets prove. Of course, Sinclair's own story Monday on the Stolen Honor controversy, aired locally on WTTA-Ch. 38, left out such inconvenient facts.
As right-leaning media outlets go, Sinclair has been brazen in its ham-fisted support of the Republican Party and Bush administration, in April forbidding the ABC stations it owned from airing an edition of Nightline called "The Fallen," which simply listed all the U.S. troops killed in Iraq to that point. "Mr. Koppel's reading of the fallen will have no proportionality," Hyman told the New York Times in April. It's right in line with the interests of Republican supporter and Sinclair CEO David Smith, whose company has given $309,436 to the GOP since 1993, according to PoliticalMoneyLine.com (compared to $42,400 for Democrats). It's also the nightmare many activists predicted would come of allowing one company too much media ownership.
Roger Ailes and the crew at Fox News Channel would never be that obvious. But since spending millions to create a "News Central" concept in which half of its local stations' newscasts are created at Sinclair's corporate headquarters near Baltimore, the company has assiduously courted the same GOP partisans who have made Fox News a cable TV juggernaut.
Left in the dust are all the viewers watching Sinclair stations nationwide who might like some news coverage relatively free from blatant political advocacy.
Will all the right-wing pundits who regularly decry so-called liberal media bias also criticize Sinclair's heavy hand here? Or will they see it as a righteous rebalancing - especially since the company says Kerry declined an offer to appear and rebut any possible smear?
Still, the overall message here - that you can flout the rules of election-time TV broadcasts as long as you own a news outlet - is serious business. And with the looming possibility that a federal agency might actually try defining news in a free society, even the suspicion that this may be a Sinclair-backed publicity stunt doesn't ease my fears.
It's too bad the corporation charged with upholding all these standards of broadcast accuracy and truth isn't in on the joke.
Eric Deggans is a Times editorial writer. He can be reached at 727 893-8521 or deggans@sptimes.com