Little Strokes....

A victory of sorts for www.sinclairaction.com. Staples has decided to stop running ads on Sinclair's news shows. Join. Write letters. Donate. It's making a difference.

From the press release:

"Media Matters for America today announced that Staples, Inc. will no longer advertise on local news programming on Sinclair Broadcast Group TV stations nationwide. Citing an effort to be responsive to customer concerns about Sinclair's injection of partisan conservative politics into its nightly newscasts, Staples, Inc. attributed its decision in part to the response the company received from customers visiting the SinclairAction.com website."

Here's why Sinclair needs to be stopped: (http://mediamatters.org/items/200501040006)

This ran on Sinclair's 'The Point' segment of their 62 stations' news programs. See if you can smell the bias:

• [Sinclair vice president and Point host Mark] Hyman endorsed the Bush administration's proposed partial privatization of Social Security, which Democrats oppose, resolving that "Capitol Hill will pass and the President will sign legislation that restructures Social Security that preserves benefits promised to today's seniors and offers investment choices to new workers."
• Hyman echoed Republican criticism of Medicaid, resolving that its "spending will be brought under control." On December 20, The New York Times reported on the Bush administration's efforts to "curb growth of Medicaid spending," noting: "In a letter to President Bush last week, 47 Democratic senators expressed 'opposition to any Medicaid reform proposal that seeks to impose a cap on federal Medicaid spending in any form or eliminates the fundamental guarantee to Medicaid coverage for our nation's must [sic: most] vulnerable citizens.'"
• Hyman repeated his attacks on the mainstream media, resolving that "the partisan press will report only facts in the news and keep opinion in the editorial and commentary sections of their papers and newscasts." But he failed to address his own organization's lack of a counterbalance to its conservative commentary segment or the numerous factual inaccuracies that appear frequently in both "The Point" and Sinclair's twice-daily "Get This" news segment, as Media Matters has extensively documented (here, here, here, here, and here). In April 2004, Sinclair's ABC affiliates refused to broadcast an episode of ABC's Nightline in which host Ted Koppel read the names of the 700-plus U.S. soldiers who had died in Iraq up to that point, claiming: "We do not believe political statements should be disguised as news content." But Sinclair sought to disguise its own political views as news content in October when it planned to air a film attacking Senator John Kerry, Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal, and present it as news. Following Media Matters' and other groups' opposition to Sinclair's plans, Sinclair instead aired A POW Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media, a program during which Kerry attackers and the program's host made a number of factually false statements about Kerry, some of which were left uncorrected.
• Hyman criticized campaign finance reform, resolving that "Washington will come to its senses and rescind the abusive McCain-Feingold legislation because no one should have a gag order placed on them when it comes to political speech." As Media Matters has noted, Hyman has previously used attacks on campaign finance reform as a means for attacking Democrats, referring to the legislation as "McCain-Feingold-Soros legislation" in reference to progressive financier and philanthropist George Soros.
• Hyman echoed almost verbatim conservative criticisms of the federal tax code, resolving that "America dumps its tax code that punishes entrepreneurship, investment and risk-taking, and replaces it with policies that reward economic growth and savings." A report from the conservative Heritage Foundation titled "Why Congress Should Repeal the Tax Code" argued that the tax code saps "the economy's strength by punishing work, saving, investment, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship."