I’ve been too sick and busy this last week to comment on much of anything in comics, media or other geeky stuff, and I apologize for that. I’m going to try to do my best to improve my posting rate over this next week, and I hope the other contributors will as well.

One media controversy which I haven’t even touched is this whole Sinclair broadcasting thing. To recap: Sinclair Broadcasting was going to air the documentary Stolen Honor on its 60-some stations, but drew heavy criticism from the Kerry campaign. Understandable, in that this program focusing on the Viet Nam War protests of which Kerry took part would be devastating, and it IS rather close to the election. In the end, Sinclair caved, yanked Stolen Honor and aired a watered-down documentary of its own instead.

What is important is that there was more than just standard outcry: there were intimidating lawsuits filed “on behalf of shareholders.” This boils down to “if a company with shareholders airs a program that even POTENTIALLY costs them revenue they can be sued.” The precedent established here is nothing less than scary.

Look folks, I’m from the school that views the First Amendment as literally preventing the government and only the government from censoring people. The Stolen Honor guys are not guaranteed a venue any more than Michael Moore is guaranteed a venue (although notice how much more easily Moore gets one). I’m comfortable with the arrangement we have always had with network TV and our capitalist check-and-balance system: if we don’t like what a network airs, we can complain, tune out, boycott sponsors, etc. … and let the networks and sponsors decide if the protests outweigh the interested audience and act accordingly.

Now there’s a whole new precedent of using trial lawyers to sue on behalf of any complaining stock holders. Well dang, maybe I’ll buy some CBS stock just so I can join in the suit against CBS News when that eventually happens. Seems to me that the people giggling with victory are going to be aghast when this is used against the far more programs in the media that they support.

(JUST to be clear…I am not supporting its use against them. I think it’s a horrible idea no matter who is doing it.)

On a related note, Stolen Honor is now available for viewing for free online (albeit in a very small picture and a 13 meg file size).