Progressive activists on the Internet have focused increasing attention on Sinclair Broadcast Group. The television conglomerate has instructed its 62 local broadcast stations to air a documentary-style political program that is highly critical of presidential candidate John Kerry. Democrats are angered at the apparent in-kind contribution to the Bush-Cheney campaign.

Even before the legal battles began, left-leaning bloggers were raising a ruckus.

I have just purchased the http://www.stopsinclair.com website address. It will take about 24 hours for it to be up.

What I need from all of you right now is HELP - this means helping me to set up some pre-made pages by way of text. I want to be able to cut and paste the text right into a webpage - a VERY SIMPLE ONE.

. . . .

I am working on this bigtime.

Several discussions started on blogs such as DailyKos focusing on developing strategies to oppose Sinclair. These included complaining to the FCC and, more specically, challenging the renewal of Sinclair’s broadcast licenses. Others advocated complaints to Sinclair’s shareholders. The most effective approach seems to be targeting Sinclair’s advertisers. Websites that list Sinclair’s customers by market or facilitate FCC complaints have emerged overnight.

I think if the major weblogs starting talking about this, it could happen. As for what to do about Sinclair’s last-minute attempt to swing this campaign for Bush, as I said earlier the only thing I see that local Democratic activists can do on short notice is to organize pickets and get media attention by calling these affiliates out as fronts for the Bush/Cheney reelection campaign through their ownership and affiliation with Sinclair. That will be enough to get the media attention and to plant the image in local voters’ minds that Sinclair and its affiliates are really nothing more than biased abusers of the public’s airwaves. But I don’t really expect Sinclair to back down on this because this was sprung on us (by design I expect) too late for us to organize sufficiently to do them damage on this, as is the case in Maryland and the Virginias.

But on the longer term, I think the license challenge campaign can really send a message and point media coverage to this issue and to Sinclair’s detriment. And more importantly, it would demonstrate that the Internet can be used to take on a major right wing media conglomerate and hold them accountable for the corporate welfare they receive in the form of these public airwave licenses, and their abuse of those public airwaves for partisan politics obviously aimed at influencing elections to their benefit through an organized smear campaign with connections to the White House.

(From The Left Coaster.) Josh Marshall has been reporting these developments closely (and participating enthusiastically) on his political commentary blog, Talking Points Memo.

It isn’t like a Swift Boat ad. It actually is a Swift Boat ad.

A perspicacious TPM reader (JJG) notes that a September 29th press release on the ‘Stolen Honor’ website announced that ‘POWs for Truth’, the sponsor of the ‘documentary’, was merging with ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’ to form the new consolidated group ‘Swift Vets and POWs For Truth.’

If it weren’t so disgusting, it would almost be funny.

So the Swift Boat folks are hawking a ‘documentary’ put together by a guy who has specialized for the last fifteen years or so in made-to-order investigations for various right-wing outfits like Rev. Moon. Sinclair orders their 62 network affiliates to run the thing in prime time days before the election. And they give the Swift Boat folks the ad time for free on the premise that they’re running it as news programming.

TPM even attracted the attention of Former FFC Chair Reed Hundt.

This event is an excellent example of the emergent, ad hoc organizing activity — swarming behavior — that Howard detailed in Smart Mobs. If readers are aware of similar activity on the GOP side of the aisle, please post links in the comment section here. I’m interested to see if this sort of political swarming increases as the election approaches.

Progressive activists on the Internet have focused increasing attention on Sinclair Broadcast Group. The television conglomerate has instructed its 62 local broadcast stations to air a documentary-style political program that is highly critical of presidential candidate John Kerry. Democrats are angered at the apparent in-kind contribution to the Bush-Cheney campaign.
Even before [...]