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Stolen Honor [SINclair Broadcasting Group Owned!]

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(Get it? "SIN"clair? I'm so witty I could shit.)

Was the decision to air "Stolen Honor" driven by politics or profiteering on plummeting stock prices?



http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/index.html

"With Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s stock tanking, investors aren’t pleased about losing millions to further the management’s right-wing agenda. Since the company announced that it was going to air "Stolen Honor," a hit piece on John Kerry, on all of its 62 TV stations, the company has lost about $140 million in market cap and is threatened with a boycott that could lead to further losses."

"But when William Lorach, a partner in the law firm, started looking into Sinclair, he realized that several of the company’s senior executives and one member of its board of directors unloaded all their stock before the price tumbled."

""W]e have discovered that senior executives and a director of Sinclair appear to have taken advantage of their inside knowledge of the Company’s business and prospects to sell over $18.5 million worth of Sinclair stock, most of which sales took place near the stock’s 52-week high of almost $15.50 per share," Lorach wrote in a letter to Sinclair’s board."

"Meanwhile, other Sinclair investors are also getting restive. Today, Atrios posted a link to a letter that New York Comptroller Alan Hevesi wrote to Sinclair CEO David Smith regarding the 256,600 shares of Sinclair stock held by the New York State Common Retirement Fund. In it, Hevesi demands to know how much the decision to run the Kerry smear has cost the company and how it might affect its financial future. "Some critics suggest that Sinclair management is more interested in advancing its partisan political views than in protecting shareholder value," he wrote. "They say Sinclair’s partisan agenda also risks alienating viewers, advertisers and regulators. Could you explain why they are wrong?"
 

Lemonz

Member
BALTIMORE, Oct. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Sinclair Broadcast Group (Nasdaq: SBGI - News) announced today that on Friday, October 22, 2004 at 8:00 p.m. (7:00 p.m. central time) certain television stations owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. will air a special one-hour news program, entitled "A POW Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media." ....

The news special will focus in part on the use of documentaries and other media to influence voting, which emerged during the 2004 political campaigns, as well as on the content of certain of these documentaries. .....

Contrary to numerous inaccurate political and press accounts, the Sinclair stations will not be airing the documentary "Stolen Honor" in its entirety. At no time did Sinclair ever publicly announce that it intended to do so. ......

While the news special will discuss the allegations surrounding Senator John Kerry's anti-Vietnam War activities in the early 1970s raised by a number of former POWs in "Stolen Honor," it will do so in the context of the broader discussion outlined above....

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/041019/phtu047a_1.html
 
Contrary to numerous inaccurate political and press accounts, the Sinclair stations will not be airing the documentary "Stolen Honor" in its entirety. At no time did Sinclair ever publicly announce that it intended to do so. ......

Damage Control at its finest.
 

explodet

Member
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=6576198

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The director of a documentary about John Kerry's Vietnam service sued Sinclair Broadcast Group on Thursday, accusing it of illegally copying his photographs in a controversial anti-Kerry movie it plans to air portions of this week.

George Butler filed the copyright infringement suit one day before Sinclair, one of the largest U.S. television broadcasting companies, plans to broadcast part of "Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal" in a one-hour television program discussing allegations about the Democratic presidential candidate's anti-Vietnam War activities in the 1970s.

The suit, filed in Manhattan federal court, seeks unspecified damages and an order barring Sinclair and film distributors from selling or showing the movie containing copyrighted photographs and film footage.
 
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