More on Sinclair Firing

We mentioned last night that Sinclair Broadcasting had fired it's Washington bureau chief. Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice has an excellent analysis.

Question: why do people still believe the "disgruntled" employee garbage? When The Moderate Voice was a journalist that phrase usually meant: The employee is telling the TRUTH and its the weakest thing they can come up with to discredit him.

THE BOTTOM LINE:
(1) The bureau chief's firing undermines the argument this will be a news special.
(2) It sounds like the company is conceptually changing it's original plan, softening it a bit. But coming down hard on Kerry and not being just as tough with critics' allegations about Bush won't cut it. In real news operations editors try very hard (even if they don't always succeed) to balance one side's allegations with the other's. Perfunctory news standards won't do; Sinclair made this corporate creditility mess themselves and only they can solve it.

But the image of a news bureau chief who spoke out and was fired will linger -- and be picked up by the mainstream media. In the end, it could be more of a negative to the Bush campaign than a positive.