Brooke Gladstone: This is the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Just over a year ago, we reported on the purchase of The Baltimore Sun by David Smith, the executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Female Speaker: David Smith is known not only for his right-wing broadcasting network, Sinclair, but also for his support of conservative causes and groups, including Project Veritas, Turning Points USA, and Moms for Liberty.

Brooke Gladstone: Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab described the sale at the time as, "An exploration of whether there can be a worse newspaper owner than Alden Global Capital." When Smith met with The Sun staff after the acquisition was complete, he told reporters to, "Go make me some money." Turns out that's not particularly motivational. New numbers out this month show that The Sun's readership is way down. Circulation of The Sunday paper declined by about 44% and daily readership fell, too, by about 37%. Meanwhile, website traffic has cratered and at least 20 journalists have left the paper.

On the occasion of these bad numbers, we'll revisit a couple of illuminating conversations we had last January with two Baltimore natives. The first is Milton Kent, professor of practice in the School of Global Journalism and Communication at Morgan State University.

Milton Kent: John Oliver did a spectacular takedown a few years ago of how the word came down from Sinclair headquarters, which is here in the Baltimore suburbs. The word came down that they wanted an editorial to be read verbatim on each of its stations across the country.

John Oliver: Sinclair can sometimes dictate the content of your local newscast, and in contrast to Fox News, a clearly conservative outlet where you basically know what you're getting, with Sinclair, they're injecting Foxworthy content into the mouths of your local news anchors.

Reporter: Did the FBI have a personal vendetta in pursuing the Russia investigation of President Trump's former national security advisor, Michael Flynn?

Reporter: Did the FBI have a personal vendetta in pursuing the Russia investigation of President Trump's former national security advisor, Michael Flynn?

Reporter: Did the FBI have a personal vendetta-

Reporter: -in pursuing the Russia investigation of-

Reporter: -President Trump's former national security advisor, Michael Flynn?

Milton Kent: Whether they were in Baltimore, Phoenix, wherever, that's concerning.

Brooke Gladstone: Kent started his career at The Baltimore Sun. He even won a full tuition college scholarship from the paper.

Milton Kent: You could pretty much say that I owe my career to The Baltimore Sun.

Brooke Gladstone: After graduation, he worked there for over 20 years.

Milton Kent: What concerns me is that Sinclair seems to have an in for the city of Baltimore. One of their pet ideas is a thing called Project Baltimore, where they supposedly expose wrongdoing in the city school system.

Micah Loewinger: Baltimore City is the fifth most-funded large school system in America but from this investigation, we analyze state data and we found a lot of that money is going to educate students who are labeled whereabouts unknown but the school is still getting the money to educate that child, and it's a lot.

Brooke Gladstone: Kent and others found that the project reporting lacked vital context and facts that would've led to a less damning conclusion.

Milton Kent: I think every school system can stand a bit of scrutiny, but in this case, it seems almost personal. Alarm bells went off for me when I read that the new owner, David Smith, said to the staff of The Sun that he thought that Project Baltimore was an ideal model for how The Sun should operate going forward.

Micah Loewinger: A 2018 study by Emory's Gregory J. Martin and Josh McCrain found that stations newly bought by Sinclair cut their coverage of local politics by roughly 10% and boosted coverage of national politics by roughly 25%. A 2019 study found that Sinclair's political coverage leaned on dramatic rhetoric and partisan sources effectively pulling viewers to the right. Apparently, these new Sinclair stations weren't responding to any pent-up demand for conservative local news. On average, they lost viewers when they made these changes, but at no great cost, since national news is so much cheaper to cover than local news because one DC-based talking head can serve 100 markets.

Meanwhile, research shows that when local news declines or disappears, political corruption increases along with voter apathy. Journalism professor and former son reporter, Milton Kent, fears the dominance of Sinclair's national agenda could create a devastating ripple effect.

Milton Kent: In the summertime when you go pick up a dozen crabs and lay the newspaper on the table to crack the crabs on, but I think The Sun has meant more to the people of this market, of this city, than just a place to lay your crabs on. Many of us feared that Alden would shrink the paper down to a husk. I don't think any of us feared that it would be antagonistic to the city that it's supposed to serve.

Brooke Gladstone: Well, now they do. In recent years, there's been mounting interest and investment in nonprofit media. A trend scholar Brad Houston calls the Alden effect. Consider the nonprofit Baltimore Banner, a digital news outlet launched in 2022, in response to Alden's expected pillaging of The Baltimore Sun. Banner reporters covered The Sun's newest potentially even more worrying owner, David Smith, among them Liz Bowie, who before joining the Banner worked for some 30 years at The Sun starting in 1986.

Liz Bowie: It was a huge bustling newsroom with seven or eight foreign bureaus, a large Washington staff. We had eight education reporters at the time, and we were considered a national publication.

Brooke Gladstone: Later, the Tribune Publishing chain, once owner of the LA Times and Newsday, among others, became The Sun's parent company, and Bowie watched as The Sun's staff shrank and shrank at the hands of the Tribune chain's new owner, private equity billionaire Sam Zell.

Liz Bowie: All of the real estate associated with these venerable institutions like The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun and The Hartford Courant were sold out from under us and we had to then pay rent to the company. That money didn't go into supporting the journalism. By the time 2018 rolled around, there were only about 70 journalists left in the newsroom from about 450. It was a much-shrunken enterprise.

Brooke Gladstone: Still, The Baltimore Sun produced great reporting, Bowie was part of The Sun team that won a Pulitzer in 2020, about the same time that Alden came calling. Bowie launched a movement with her union to halt The Sun sale to the hedge fund called Save Our Sun.

Liz Bowie: I think everybody in The Sun newsroom was terrified when we heard that Alden was buying up the stock. I had been speaking over the years with some of the leaders of local foundations who were interested in buying The Sun, as well as Ted Venetoulis, a former politician who had a great deal of interest in the media. I called them all and I said, "This is my 911 call. If you guys are really serious about trying to save the paper, you have to do it now, because this is who's trying to buy us."

We started to meet in the early morning in a Downtown hotel in secret. We started Save Our Sun, and by May we had collected about 6,000 signatures. We sent the petition to the Tribune board and asked them to please vote against Alden. There was a strong local interest in bringing the ownership of the paper back to the city, and of course, they ignored us, but it alerted many people in the community to what was happening.

Brooke Gladstone: Enter the local hotel entrepreneur and philanthropist who fought for the ownership of The Sun. He tried to purchase the paper as well as the Tribune, the parent company.

Liz Bowie: Stewart Bainum is a hotelier and former politician. He began calling people all over the country and saying, "How do you run a newspaper? How do you make local news sustainable?" He then said, "Okay, I'm in," and began negotiating for the sale of The Baltimore Sun.

Brooke Gladstone: They offered too high a price, and he decided that instead of buying The Sun, he'd buy The Sun's parent company.

Liz Bowie: Right, just for The Sun, and then sell off the other papers to local owners in those cities who might be interested. Once he started going after Tribune, then Alden Global Capital came to him and said, "Oh, wait, maybe we'll sell you The Sun. How about we buy Tribune and we will sell you The Sun?" Then there was a tentative deal between Alden and Stewart Bainum.

Brooke Gladstone: Bainum should have bought The Tribune because, in the end, Alden wanted to squeeze him 12 ways from Sunday. Alden prevailed.

Liz Bowie: Then Stewart began to think about starting his own publication, and he began hiring people. He eventually hired Kimi Yoshino, managing editor at The Los Angeles Times, to run the operation in the fall of 2021.

Brooke Gladstone: Thus, the Baltimore Banner was born, where you are now a reporter. You've been there since the beginning, as have many of your colleagues from The Sun, but weirdly, something happened after Alden gained ownership, usually, hedge funds lay off reporters, but in this case, they offered reasonably generous buyouts and the layoffs never came.

Liz Bowie: The day after the sale went through, Alden offered buyouts to almost everybody in The Tribune Company. In the case of The Chicago Tribune, and many of the other papers, as many as 10% of the people who were offered buyouts took them. At The Baltimore Sun, no one took it. I think that was because perhaps we'd fought so hard for our newspaper.

Brooke Gladstone: Why did Alden not slash and burn?

Liz Bowie: I think that Heath Freeman who heads Alden Global Capital, and Stewart Bainum, were in a very fierce competition, first to get The Sun and then to get Tribune. I don't think Alden wanted The Baltimore Banner to overtake The Sun. There's ego involved here, right? I'm guessing.

Brooke Gladstone: You're saying this was a bleep measuring contest?

Liz Bowie: Yes.

[laughter]

Liz Bowie: I don't know that for sure, but about 20% of the current staff of The Banner came from The Sun. Every one of them was replaced for a long time, it didn't cut into the number of journalists in The Sun newsroom for a while.

Brooke Gladstone: Recently, The Sun and The Banner were engaged in an old-style competition for a story involving the Catholic Church.

Liz Bowie: Yes, this spring, when the Attorney General released a report about sexual abuse by priests in the church in Maryland, the two news organizations competed to unmask a number of priests, their names had been redacted. What happened was, The Sun did half of them and The Banner did the other half. The community benefited from all of this competition, this rise in the number of reporters. What is really wonderful is The Baltimore Banner has really added a lot of reporters to the media ecosystem in Maryland.

What you have now is 76 more reporters who are writing different stories, who are writing the same stories as The Sun, competing with them. That means that readers will get their news faster, that the reporters on beats that are competitive will be more aggressive, working way harder because they don't want to get beaten. That story alone told us what happens when you have good competition and so many more reporters in one city looking at things and looking under rocks.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, The Sun has been purchased from Alden by David Smith, executive chairman of Sinclair. Tell me what you know about Smith and his company, Sinclair, you and your colleagues at The Banner have been reporting on this.

Liz Bowie: We know that Smith owns 200 television stations, including a Fox station in our area. Many of those stations have a very conservative slant. I think he will insist that there be a more conservative view in his newspaper.

Brooke Gladstone: Smith and his stations have been accused of leaning too far and have run afoul of federal regulators. They once racked up a record-breaking $48 million in FCC fines for deceptive practices during an attempted merger with Tribune. Jared Kushner said in 2016, that the Trump campaign would provide Sinclair stations with extensive access to Trump in exchange for friendly coverage that did not include fact-checking. Smith told Trump in a 2016 meeting, "We are here to deliver your message."

Liz Bowie: We don't know what's going to happen yet with The Baltimore Sun. We don't know how far he will go in interfering in the newsgathering. David Smith has bought The Sun independent of Sinclair, so Sinclair does not own The Sun.

Brooke Gladstone: That is true, but in the past, haven't they worked together to promote each other's material?

Liz Bowie: Yes, they have. I think we know that he has a record of doing journalism in Baltimore that I believe does not have context. I've seen journalists working for Fox45 who leave out very pertinent facts when they report a story. They often end up being inaccurate in the sense they don't give readers a whole picture of what's actually happening.

Brooke Gladstone: If The Sun did become more like Fox45, Sinclair's station, how would that alter the media landscape in Maryland? How would it affect how reporters at The Banner do their work?

Liz Bowie: I am very concerned about this. I worry that there then becomes a cloud of misinformation that spreads pretty widely, that polarizes our community. That all of the things that have happened with national news start happening on a local level, so that's very concerning. I think as a reporter, I would have to fight that misinformation in my reporting.

Brooke Gladstone: That does seem to be part of the job these days. Is the goodwill of very rich individuals the best hope for local journalism?

Liz Bowie: To some degree, I think it is. Stewart Bainum has definitely given us a big runway, but his philanthropy will end at some point. I think you may need a substantial amount of philanthropy to get you off the ground but what we're trying to prove is that once you get started, you can do it alone, sustainable at scale. Stewart Bainum said you have to create a large enough organization that the journalism is so compelling that subscribers agree to support it. What we are trying to prove is that if you create a big newsroom and a good product, that there is support out there in communities across the nation to sustain it.

Brooke Gladstone: It makes me feel so hopeful. There is actually still State House coverage in the city of Baltimore. It's missing in so many other cities across the country.

Liz Bowie: Yes. I have spent a long time in journalism now, I've been a newspaper reporter forever, it seems, and I have never been more excited or committed to what I've been doing. I poured every ounce of myself into trying to save The Baltimore Sun from a hedge fund owner, and it was an emotional rollercoaster that I will never forget. I am also so hopeful right now. I go to work really excited every day thinking that we may actually make this work. It's been one of the most joyful times in my life.

Brooke Gladstone: Liz, thank you so much.

Liz Bowie: Take care.

Brooke Gladstone: Liz Bowie is an education reporter for The Baltimore Banner. Thanks for listening to the midweek podcast. Tune into the big show on Friday. We post it late in the day. To hear how free speech is being chilled in all sorts of ways under Trump 2.0.

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