Where is Peter Sellers when you need him?

The man who played three characters in Dr. Strangelove would have a field day with the Smith brothers, whose family owns the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Their office complex is in a modern facility in suburban Maryland, but each brother sits in his own identical dark wood paneled office surrounded by paintings and sculptures by Remington and Winchester, lords of the manor. These hysterical figures – a Sinclair executive recently compared the network news programs to “Holocaust deniers,” for what he felt was insufficient coverage of POWs in Vietnam; another executive was recently arrested for patronizing a hooker – may have a real bearing on the presidential election. Kubrick and Southern couldn’t have made it up to be any more surreal.

Sinclair is planning to pre-empt regular prime time programming on all their affiliates across the country in order to show a documentary highly critical of John Kerry’s service in Vietnam. The filmmaker has made one previous movie, a documentary about the Moonies. It was commissioned by… the Moonies.

A decade of screaming about the “Liberal Media” has made CNN into a harem of eunuchs and brought the profession of journalism to a near crisis point, and here we have a media company that owns affiliates in twenty five percent of the American market screening unpaid propaganda over public airwaves. Can you imagine the outcry if the company was planning to pre-empt its programming to air material critical of President Bush?

There is action to be taken, and it happens to be fun or, at the least, interesting: call the advertisers who take out ads on these Sinclair affiliates, and try and convince them that it is in their best interest, as businesses, and as citizens, to pull their ads.»