Chances are you've never heard of Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sure, it might be the largest independent owner of television stations in America, an empire of sixty channels spread across thirtyseven cities with a signal that reaches nearly a quarter of the TVwatching public, but even if you happen to receive that signal and watch it every night, getting your Sinclair news and Sinclair weather and Sinclair commentary from a Sinclair station, chances are you've still never heard of Sinclair and have no idea you're watching it. You won't see the word Sinclair on your screen, and you'll probably just think you're watching ABC or CBS or NBC, whichever network you thought you tuned in. Right there on the screen, you'll see the old familiar logo—a peacock, an eye, the ABC bubble—and the anchors will look the same as ever, and the fact that the station has been purchased by Sinclair will be no more apparent than the fact that twenty or thirty minutes into the program, the real news will suddenly fade to black and Sinclair's news will take over. It may be a glowing interview with a defense contractor or a fiery commentary on the evils of the French, something brief and punchy lasting two or ten or fourteen minutes, then slipping back into the regular news as quietly as it came. Not so much as a blip or a bleep to let you know that what you just witnessed was not the local NBC or CBS broadcast but just a little insert from the guys who own the station. That's the goal at Sinclair: to be seen without being seen.

"Propaganda always works better if it seems not to be propaganda—if it seems to be entertainment, or if it seems to be news," says Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of culture and communication at New York University. "These people want to dominate the public sphere, but they don't want us to know that."

Lately, though, this balancing act has been getting harder to sustain. Especially since last year's presidential campaign, the company's efforts to inject partisan spin into its local "news" have become increasingly bold and increasingly obvious. In April 2004, the company forbade all of its ABC stations to air a segment of Nightline in which Ted Koppel read the names of American casualties in Iraq, which Sinclair's management considered "motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States." Six months later, Sinclair ecutives launched a political effort of their own, instructing all their news stations to broadcast a documentary on John Kerry called Stolen Honor, which accused the candidate of treason during the Vietnam War. In the buzz that followed, Sinclair's vice president of corporate relations, Mark Hyman, stoked the fire even further by announcing that any network that refused to air the antiKerry documentary were "acting like Holocaust deniers" and that even if the documentary was a gift to Bush, the effect was balanced by the existence of suicide bombers in the Middle East, since after all, "Every car bomb in Iraq would be considered an inkind contribution to John Kerry." Nearly three months later, the company was back in the hot seat, this time forced to admit that one of its most visible reporters, Armstrong Williams, had not only spent recent years landing exclusive interviews with men like Dick Cheney and Tom DeLay but was also getting paid handsomely by the Bush administration, having struck a deal with the White House to receive $240,000 in exchange for "favorable commentaries." Yes, by the beginning of this year, Sinclair was getting hard to ignore.

And yet ignoring Sinclair is exactly what most of the mainstream media have done. Reporting each controversy as an isolated event, almost every major newspaper and television network has either skipped or skimmed the larger story of Sinclair itself. Many of the most critical questions surrounding the company have yet to be asked, let alone answered. For example, while much has been made of Sinclair's conservative bias, little has been said about whose bias it really is. When critics of Dan Rather or Helen Thomas accuse them of biased reporting, the implication is that they are letting their personal opinions influence the news. At Sinclair, the facts are not so simple. A close look at the four brothers who own Sinclair—David, Duncan, Frederick, and Robert Smith—reveals a much less conservative cast of characters than one might expect. Far from the Biblethumping, familyvalues stereotype that Sinclair's critics imagine, the Smiths are a study in contrasts—especially the two principal owners, David and Duncan. Even as they lobby for government deregulation and a return to some idealized notion of 1950s family values, Duncan is a passionate environmentalist working to restore the power of the Environmental Protection Agency, while David got his start not in the conservative familyvalues business but selling bootleg pornography.