well, anyone see Sinclair's special? was it on

[mitchtv]

huh?

[GregW]

1. Dude - try the search link!

There's been tons of threads on this here. And yes - it was on.

[yardwork]

2. I saw it and hated it. There are a bunch of threads about it

Look in GD and GD2004. Apparently some freepers didn't like it either.

I thought it was extremely biased against Kerry and Democrats while pretending to be even-handed. Typical Karl Rove trick. Wouldn't be surprised if he helped write it.

The piece was a hodge-podge of bits and pieces obviously thrown together by Sinclair at the last minute. They did include clips from Up the River and interviews with Baker (Up the River director) as well as Kerry speaking, and some interviews with pro-Kerry vets. All that was fine, but Sinclair did what they could to downplay the pro-Kerry bits and play up the anti-Kerry, anti-Democracy speakers.

For instance, when pro-Kerry speakers were on, they were linked by satellite, small pictures of their faces, poor lighting and sound. When anti-Kerry people spoke they were in the studio with the Sinclair "host," full-face, high resolution lighting, loud sound.

When clips from the JibJab parody were shown they were all the anti-Kerry bits, none of the anti-Bush bits.

The piece did mention "questions" about AWOL's lack of service, but it was done in a dismissive manner, whitewashing the known evidence.

They also worked a number of misrepresentations and outright lies about Kerry's service into the piece, including somebody quoted as saying "Kerry served only four months in Vietnam." While this is stricly true (he was actually in Vietnam (and Cambodia) for four months), it totally ignores the larger truth of the years he served during the Vietnam War on a ship in the Gulf. No mention that Kerry actually volunteered for two terms in Vietnam and was sent home four months into the second term because he was wounded three times.

That sort of misrepresentation permeated the show. I wrote the FCC and advertisers to express my displeasure.

[high density]

3. It painted Democrats as free speech haters

And it also had a piece that was against anti-war movements.

But about John Kerry himself, I thought it was a wash. They showed one of those far out clips from "Stolen Honor" that basically repeated all of the crazy statements heard in the Swift Boat ads, but then they showed a clip from "Going Upriver" which I thought did a decent job neutralizing that. The "Going Upriver" clip explained how dangerous swift boat duty was and also had Jim Rassmann telling his story of how Kerry lifted him up out of the water.

It was so poorly produced and bady edited that it was hard to take seriously. I'm curious as to how many people watched it. It clearly cost my local affiliate thousands of dollars because they had to preempt the rather popular "Joan of Arcadia" to show it.