Baltimore Fights the Right-Wing Takeover of The Baltimore Sun

Although Elon Musk’s quixotic purchase of Twitter, which he redubbed X, seems to have played a significant role in giving him full and unfettered access to the gears of government, one right-wing rich guy’s purchase of a media company did not result in his desired electoral outcome last year. Putative billionaire David D. Smith, Sinclair Broadcast Group’s executive chair, bought The Baltimore Sun in January 2024 and, yet, his candidates in the primary and a ballot initiative that he solely funded were resoundingly defeated by voters in Baltimore. 

The measure sought to reduce the size of Baltimore’s City Council from 14 to eight. Voters seemingly rejected the measure not despite the fact that Smith promoted the issue on Fox 45, the crown jewel of Sinclair’s empire of local TV stations, and in The Baltimore Sun, but because of it. (Sinclair Broadcast Group, a publicly traded company, has repeatedly distanced itself from Smith’s activist measures and was not involved in the purchase of The Baltimore Sun.)

Smith grew up in Baltimore, and he and his family have business interests around the city, including a car dealership, a restaurant group, and even a cannabis company. But Smith — whose Sinclair Broadcast is located, like his home, in the county, outside of city limits — has the sensibility of a county resident who loves to hate the city. His media properties cultivate a similar audience. The Sun, under Smith’s ownership, quickly showed signs of this editorial bent, leading many staffers to revolt. 

“We are here today because our union members are watching distressing changes play out on the pages of our own newspaper,” said Christine Condon, the unit rep of the Baltimore Sun Guild, at an August lunch-time protest. “The Sun began publishing articles from his company, Sinclair Broadcasting, including thinly reported stories based on partisan talking points,” Condon continued. 

In a statement, the Guild cited a story using the term “illegal immigrants,” which “is not used in The Sun, per industry best practices from the Associated Press, which do not condone referring to people as ‘illegal,’” and an op-ed written by part-owner Armstrong Williams equating the “transgender movement” with “cancer.”

Smith and the nearly 200 local television stations controlled by Sinclair have long played an outsized role in both national and local politics — precisely by seeming not to. The business and political innovation that sets Smith and Sinclair apart from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is that Sinclair owns stations affiliated with all the major — and many minor — networks. There is no big Sinclair logo to alert viewers to right-wing content. Instead, it comes through the mouthpiece of trusted local news anchors on ABC, NBC, or CBS, who tell you about the weather or the high school football game alongside right-wing talking points about crime, failing public schools, immigration, homelessness, and diversity initiatives. 

“You have a way to get right-wing MAGA talking points in the mouths of your anchors,” says David Zurawik, CNN commentator and former media critic for the Sun, “and it has much more resonance.” 

Studies back Zurawik up, finding that Americans place far greater trust in local news than they do national news. 

“Our goal at Sinclair is to provide balanced and comprehensive coverage of news that is relevant to our audience,” Jessica Bellucci, a spokesperson wrote in a statement. “Our aim is to provide accurate and timely coverage reflecting the diversity and complexity of the communities we serve. This is the only message we seek to deliver.” 

Long before the advent of Donald Trump’s political movement, Smith experimented with the political power of local news. In 2004, Sinclair directed all of its stations to air interviews and commentary by conservative media figure and now Baltimore Sun co-owner Armstrong Williams; the Bush administration had paid Williams $240,000 to promote their educational policies. Sinclair forced its stations to air a pledge of support for President Bush and refused to broadcast a Nightline episode that named those who died in the Iraq War, while bringing national attention to Stolen Honor, a “documentary” intended to cast doubt on John Kerry’s war service. In 2005, an ex-producer told Rolling Stone he was ordered not to air “any bad news out of Iraq — no dead servicemen, no reports on how much we’re spending, nothing.” 

This effort was redoubled in the Trump era. In 2016, according to Jared Kushner, the Trump campaign struck a deal with Sinclair trading uncritical coverage for access. While Smith denied this was anything other than a typical journalistic practice, he said he told Trump directly: “We are here to deliver your message. Period.”

This was a sort of inflection point when some people came to perceive Sinclair as a sinister national force, when Deadspin made a brilliant supercut of the company’s local anchors all over the country, repeating Sinclair’s script about “fake news,” and John Oliver devoted a segment of Last Week Tonight. 

The lovefest between Smith and Trump was mutual. After a long-expected merger between Sinclair and Tribune Media, which would have put Sinclair stations into close to 75 percent of American homes, was quashed in 2018 by the Federal Communications Commission in the wake of public pressure and Sinclair’s refusal to divest any stations in places were they would own too many networks, then-President Trump tweeted: “So sad and unfair that the FCC wouldn’t approve the Sinclair Broadcast merger with Tribune. This would have been a great and much needed Conservative voice for and of the People.”

Though the role of Sinclair in the presidential election and the new Trump administration won’t be clear for some time, Smith’s renewed involvement in the local politics of Baltimore, combined with his January 2024 purchase of The Baltimore Sun, the city’s paper of record, indicates a new front in Smith’s campaign to use his media outlets to influence and not just report on politics. 

But Smith’s increasing involvement in local politics has sparked a backlash from the city’s political class, its activists, and from within the paper itself, while leaving long-time readers both sad and angry.

“The Baltimore Sun is part and parcel of Baltimore City. What the hell business is it of [Smith’s] to rip up an institution that has meant so much,” says Baltimore resident and life-long subscriber Donna Beth Joy Shapiro, who says she has read the Sun in print every day for the last 60 years. “The few times that I was out of town, I would read it in print when I got home.”

Now, however, she says, “I read it under protest sometimes.”

Others are giving up their subscriptions altogether. Subscription data is not publicly available but when a staffer asked Smith how many subscribers the paper has lost since he bought it, he replied by saying that he did not know, but that “on a relative basis” the number is “immaterial compared to what you’ve lost in the last three years.”

At press time, more than 20 members of the Sun’s union have left the paper since Smith bought the paper. 

Smith’s only response to Rolling Stone’s repeated requests for comment was a hearty “Not interested!”

THE BALTIMORE SUN was once one of America’s great newspapers, the home of H.L. Mencken, Laura Lippman, David Simon, Russell Baker, and numerous Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters and editors. When A.S. Abell founded it in 1837, it was part of a wave of “penny papers,” which did more than anything else to invent the modern idea of unaffiliated, objective newspaper journalism in America. Before that, most of the papers were party organs, but Abell realized he could make a lot more money if the paper sold to all parties, hence the slogan “Light for All.” 

Smith’s purchase of the Sun might well stick the fork in the cooked carcass of that model. “If you think about it, the idea of the unaligned professional press had a very short shelf-life in American political history,” says David Simon, creator of The Wire and several other HBO shows, and a veteran Sun reporter who came in to the paper in 1983, just before the Abell family sold to the first of a series of newspaper chains. “This was always the devil to be resisted. It was a temptation not to play the kingmaker or put your hand on the scales.”

Rather than a temptation to be resisted, the ability to play kingmaker seems to be the reason Smith bought the Sun. At the time of the purchase, the Sun had passed through several out-of-town owners and was held by the vulture capitalist hedge fund Alden Capital. The editor, Trif Alatzas, is also the publisher, so there has been no firewall between the business and editorial side of the paper for close to a decade. (For full disclosure, I worked at Baltimore City Paper, when the Sun bought it in 2014, only to close it in 2017). Alatzas has not returned repeated messages requesting comment. 

Like so many American dailies, by the time Smith came along, the Sun was already a shell of what it had once been, and many of its journalists had fled for the Baltimore Banner, a new online, nonprofit started by Maryland hotelier Stewart W. Bainum Jr., who had previously tried to buy the Sun. But, still, the remaining staff members were devastated when they realized who their new boss would be. 

“It’s like, we’ve been owned by a hedge fund this whole time and then we get purchased by somebody local and then this is the person,” says one of the many staffers we spoke to for this story who wish to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. 

“He was built for the role of evil new leader of any organization,” says another journalist of their first impression. 

“We need a real commitment to uphold the journalistic standards that Sun journalists have worn as a badge of honor through all my time at the paper, even when we were being downsized by corporations and abandoned by advertisers,” said Dan Rodricks, who has been a reporter and columnist at the paper for 48 years, at the lunch-time protest in August. Rodricks has since announced his retirement. 

They got the opposite. Just after the sale was announced, Smith held a long meeting with Sun staffers where he outlined his vision for the paper. 

“You will become in the poll business. You will do polls on a daily basis, if not regular basis, on the front page of the paper it will say ‘please go to your website or whatever it is and vote on the following issue,” Smith told the staffers in the January 2024 meeting, tapes of which Rolling Stone has reviewed. 

“We ask very simple questions,” Smith says. “What is it you’re most afraid of?” 

It’s a strategy in perfect alignment with Trump: Tell us what it is you are most afraid of and we’ll sell it back to you. This fear often comes with a healthy dose of racism, because, for white Baltimore county residents who watch a lot of Sinclair, Baltimore’s Black kids are one of the things they’re most afraid of and Fox 45 stokes that fear, treating crowds of Black people as an inherent threat and, in at least one egregious case, falsely editing video. 

“What they’re doing is they’re elevating narratives that feed on certain societal tropes around notions of inherent black criminality,” says Dayvon Love, the political director of “grass-roots think tank” Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. “They’re doing it on such a consistent basis, over and over and over again in their coverage, in a way that I think causes people to… believe that black people are inherently criminal.” 

Headlines such as the recent “Residents frustrated by crime, some considering a new address,” take an isolated incident and blow it up into a crisis, even though crime is going down. In another story, published the next day, the network prominently features mug shots of two Black individuals who were charged with stealing a catalytic converter in December. 

A 2024 study by the Sentencing Project backs this up, in terms of coverage of youth crime (in which Black youths are far over-represented) finding that “Fox 45 aired far more coverage of youth crime, and total crime, than the other five outlets [that were studied in Baltimore]. Overall, Fox45 ran 1,119 crime stories during the first six months of 2024,” while “three news stations and the Baltimore Banner each produced around 300 crime stories.” The study found, in fact: “During the 6-month study period, Fox 45 aired more stories about youth offending that included fear-inducing rhetoric or alleged an increase in youth crime rates (40) than the other five media outlets combined (35).”

Love sees in these numbers a policy advocacy position. 

“There’s this coverage of crime in Baltimore, then the natural inclination is there needs to be more laws that are tougher,” says Love, adding that the Sun “is another vehicle to perpetuate that.”

The Sentencing Project study supports this claim, noting that “Fox45 coverage of youth crime was often presented in ways likely to stoke public fears of youth crime and discontent with current youth justice policies.”

Long before Smith’s purchase of the paper, the Sun had been criticized — and ultimately apologized — for racist coverage, but ex-staffers, who thought the paper was improving in regards to race, lament that the paper may now follow Sinclair in “targeting Baltimore City to satisfy a bigoted suburban audience,” in the words of John McIntyre, a former long-time copy editor at the Sun.

But at least one prominent member of Baltimore’s Black community doesn’t agree with this assessment of Smith’s priorities. 

“I really don’t see this hyper-racist label that is placed on him,” says prominent Black pastor and activist Al Hathaway, who has known Smith since they went to Baltimore City College High School together in the 1960s. “I just don’t see him as racist.”

AROUND THE TIME David Smith bought the Sun, he gave over $100,000 to a PAC intended to “support Sheila Dixon” for mayor against the incumbent, Brandon Scott, who is young, progressive, and Black. Fox 45 has been waging war on Scott’s administration since 2020, when he won the office. More money flowed in from Smith’s extended family, especially his nephews, Alex and Eric Smith, who run the Atlas Restaurant group.

“Historically, there was this power-brokering crew, mainly of wealthy, rich white men… who would get into a room and decide who the mayor would be, and that they would expect that person to then give favor to them and their ideologies and all of those things,” Mayor Scott tells Rolling Stone. “David Smith, he and Sinclair come after me, because I’ve made it very clear that I wouldn’t be someone to carry their water, and I wouldn’t parrot their points of views and carry out their policies.”

Dixon, a Black woman and former mayor who resigned as part of a plea deal to resolve a corruption scandal in 2010, has remained popular and almost beat Scott in 2020. Former Councilman, and friend of Smith’s, Carl Stokes, told the Baltimore Brew, and confirmed for Rolling Stone, that Smith called him to ask about Dixon. “David says to me, ‘I don’t know Sheila. Can you introduce me? I got a proposition. I want to put together 10-12 people and give Dixon enough money to win the race.”

Dixon denies agreeing to any terms or being “buddy buddy” with Smith. “We had a meeting with other people, other mutual business people that I know that I had business with over the years, one time, but other than that, he didn’t have control of my campaign,” she tells Rolling Stone. 

Still, Dixon seemed to embrace many of Smith’s pet issues, such as firing the Baltimore City Schools CEO, and Dixon began making regular appearances on Fox 45, whose polls had her winning by a comfortable margin. People working in City Hall were getting nervous. And then, on primary day, in what felt almost like a referendum on Smith, money wasn’t the “grease to make things happen,” as Smith likes to say. It just got everyone involved all greasy. 

Not only did Sheila Dixon, Smith’s chosen mayoral candidate, lose to Smith’s nemesis, incumbent Brandon Scott, but the whole slate of candidates who were perceived as Smith’s picks got their pants handed to them, despite the combined power of the Sun and Fox 45. 

Kendrick Lamar’s brutal diss of Drake, “Not Like Us,” blasted from the speakers as Brandon Scott walked out for a victory speech. 

“We overcame the odds, including a Trump-loving Republican Super PAC that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars telling lies about our city, ignoring the progress that we have talked about, and we still won,” Scott said. “Baltimore, tonight you said very clearly that your democracy is not for sale, no matter how rich they are.”

Though his candidates lost in the primary, Smith still had the ballot measure in the general election. Designed to drastically shrink the City Council, the measure was viewed by some, in the words of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, as an effort “to undermine Black political power in Baltimore.”

“The ballot initiative is not some scheme to consolidate power, but if the public supports it, it will be a means of reducing waste and abuse of taxpayer money, all while still ensuring that Baltimoreans have enough representation,” Smith wrote of the measure. He paid more than $400,000 to get the 10,000 signatures required to put the referendum on the ballot. 

The Sun hired a former Sinclair employee as “regional multimedia editor” (a position not currently part of the Guild) to collaborate with a Fox 45 reporter on a series of stories about the ineffectuality of City Council members, stories accompanied by a “poll” asking if Baltimore’s City Council is too big. The paper also ran full-page ads in support of the initiative. 

Smith had good reason to believe the ballot measure would pass. Baltimore City voters haven’t rejected a ballot amendment in the last 20 years, and Smith himself had been part of a recent successful ballot initiative to impose two-term limits on the city’s politicians.

Hathaway, Smith’s old friend and ally in the Black church, supported the term-limit initiative, but broke with Smith on the bid to shrink the council. “I don’t agree with him on reducing the size of the city council, so I’m nowhere near that. I don’t align myself with that. I don’t believe that,” Hathaway says. 

Mayor Scott and his allies had already learned in the primary race that many people see Smith and his brands as toxic and so they fought the effort to shrink city council by linking the initiative more publicly with Sinclair and Smith. Scott’s former campaign manager set up a “Stop Sinclair” campaign.

“If people knew that the person who runs and owns that [local] station said out loud that his stations are Donald Trump’s mouthpiece and they’re there to carry his message, then they can make the connection to how their reporting is done each and every day,” Scott says. “People deserve to know how those things intersect.”

Sinclair sent a cease and desist letter to Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, who were also leading a grassroots campaign against the ballot initiative, demanding that they stop associating Sinclair, which is a publicly traded company, with Smith’s ballot measures. And, to address the mayor, Smith took to the op-ed page of the paper. Jarringly, Smith starts his editorial, which bears the headline “The Battle for Truth in My Beloved Baltimore,” by quoting the German Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt, whose “Origins of Totalitarianism,” was much cited by critics during the first Trump administration in a warning of creeping fascism.

Then he praised the freedom of the press, all because “today, Baltimore is being attacked by lies from the mouths of its mayor. The Baltimore mayor has begun a campaign against Sinclair because he wrongly believes that Sinclair is behind a critical ballot initiative that will reduce the number of City Council members from 14 to eight.”

Shortly after Smith’s op-ed, the paper published one by Jovani Patterson, who runs PEACE, the Smith-funded organization behind the effort to shrink city council — with no initial acknowledgement of the affiliation, though the disclosure was added later.

Madeleine O’Neill, a criminal justice reporter, was among those who questioned the lack of disclosure on the paper’s internal Slack Channel, remarking, according to staffers who saw the conversation, that this should be “Journalism 101.” O’Neill came to the Sun after Smith purchased it and, so, was still in a probationary period and not protected by the Guild. She had been critical of other post-Smith initiatives that affected her beat, such as a story about Marilyn Mosby, the former state’s attorney who charged police in the Freddie Gray case and is a favorite target of Fox 45, going to a party while sentenced to home detention on perjury charges. Mosby had permission from a judge to attend the party, but that information was, at first, left out of the story the Sun and Fox 45 jointly ran. 

“Running this incomplete version threatened my relationship with a source,” O’Neill wrote in a message on the Slack channel, which Rolling Stone has examined. “I can’t do my job if editors are going to undercut me like this.” 

According to sources familiar with the process, a week later, O’Neill was summoned up to the office, fired, and escorted out by security.

“David Smith is a deeply stupid man, and he’s destroying an institution full of smart and talented people *because* they’re smart and talented and he is not,” she later tweeted, but at the time, she wrote only: “I’m proud of the reporting I did at The Baltimore Sun and I have no regrets.”

But, it will likely be increasingly difficult for journalists to remain at the Sun without regrets, as both critics and ordinary readers begin to associate the employees with their bosses and question either their credibility or their ethics. Zurawik, the media critic and professor, wonders how anyone could stay on at the Sun now and has especially harsh words for the editors: “The people who are still there, who are the editors, are accomplices.”

Though two long-time editors left the paper after Smith bought it, the rest of the leadership seems intent on helping him carry out his agenda both within the paper and the city at large. 

“If they’re successful in doing it here, they’re going to do it in every single city and media-coverage area that they’re in,” Mayor Scott told Rolling Stone in October. 

This may, in fact, be part of the plan. In his meeting with Sun staffers in January 2024, Smith made it clear that he was interested in acquiring other papers. “About 6 or 8 months ago I tried to buy all the papers in the state of Maine with the exception of one,” Smith told the Sun’s staff. The owner of those papers ultimately transferred all the papers to the National Trust for Local News in 2023. 

Smith’s play in Baltimore is part of a larger trend where daily papers are mere tools in the arsenal of billionaire business interests, as has been alleged of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, after their ultra-wealthy owners prevented the paper from endorsing Harris. But even before that, with the hiring of editors from Rupert Murdoch’s papers, Politico wrote about the “Rupert Murdoch-ization of The Washington Post.” 

Smith may be following the model of Murdoch’s New York Post, which has been influencing local elections since the election of Ed Koch in 1978 and up through Eric Adams’ victorious campaign in 2021. 

Smith is certainly making the paper more like a tabloid than a traditional metropolitan daily. On the tape of his meeting with the Sun, Smith says rather plainly that Fox 45 discovered that Joan Pratt, the city’s former Comptroller, was spending most of her time on other work, by hiring private detectives to follow her 24-hours a day — and he didn’t rule out using such tactics at the Sun. 

“Can we do that now?” someone asks. “Is that on the table?”

“Absolutely,” Smith says. “As it relates to government, everything is on the table.” 

Mark Feldstein, an investigative reporter who teaches journalistic ethics at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, says that stakeouts and surveillance aren’t abnormal in investigative reporting. But, he says, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a newspaper publisher hiring private eyes to do journalism.”

A big concern is one of ethics, because “private eyes aren’t necessarily trained in the standards and practices of journalistic ethics,” he says. “Tabloids do this kind of stuff. Tabloids also pay sources for information.” Mainstream papers do not. 

The transformation could be like what happened to AM radio after the advent of FM, ceding almost all of it to conspiracists, churches, and cranks. 

IN THE INITIAL MEETING with staffers, an arts reporter asked Smith if she should look for a new job. Instead of answering, Smith went on a long rant about how he is an artist, a “world-class furniture builder,” and a photographer. But in October, the answer came, when the Sun disbanded the features desk, where arts, dining, and human interest coverage was centered. Those reporters were not laid off but moved to other desks. Smith has, in the meantime, hung his own nature photographs on the newsroom wall, with quotes attributed to Hannah Arendt, Malcolm X, Benjamin Franklin, and others.

“From consulting with a historian and our own research, we found some attributed to the wrong person, others paraphrased, still others with punctuation and spelling errors aplenty. And some were never even uttered by the person quoted,” the Guild tweeted in a thread showing these errors. “The Sun regrets the error, but this ownership sure doesn’t,” they concluded. 

In response to elimination of the features desk — and to the firing of O’Neill and erosion of Sun standards — the Guild started a byline strike for election week, in which reporters would withhold their names from stories they wrote, in protest. And in December, Guild members began handing out flyers accusing Smith of union busting out in front of the Sun’s new Harbor East office building — which also houses several Atlas restaurants that either Smith or his family own. 

As first reported by the Baltimore Brew, long-time Sun photographer Amy Davis confronted Smith when he arrived outside of the restaurants for dinner. “I have lots of union people who work for me all over the country,” Smith said. “I have no issue with unions.”

Davis asked for a fair contract and pointed out that the staff has not had an across-the-board raise for a dozen years. 

“The point is, what have you been doing for the last 12 years?” Smith responded. 

“Well, we’ve been putting out a damn good paper, even though you haven’t been reading it,” Davis said. She got in some other good quips, but when Smith entered the restaurant, there wasn’t much else the protesting staffers could do. The week prior, Alex Smith, David’s nephew and the head of the Atlas Restaurant Group, threatened to call the police on the protesting Guild members. 

In many ways, the very nature of traditional daily journalism that the Sun espouses may make its practitioners less capable of addressing Smith’s populist designs. The “both sides” that has so often characterized modern “objective” journalism, might render them less capable of addressing the ideological leanings of their new boss. 

“We’re not political appointees. We’re not supposed to be seeking a new job because of a change in administration,” says Condon, the Guild unit rep, who is also a climate reporter. “Our fight is importantly not a partisan one. It is purely a fight for the journalism. And if it were someone with the opposite political views as David Smith making the same changes, we’d be having the same conversation.”

And yet, it’s unlikely that someone with the opposite political views of Smith would make the same changes: The MAGA movement Smith has allied with is openly and repeatedly hostile to journalism itself. But, while Sun reporters continue to do good work in the paper, they have not been able to do much more in protest than withhold bylines and hold small rallies. When they announced the byline strike, about a dozen staff members came out to support the union. “H.L. Mencken just puked in his grave,” columnist Dan Rodricks read aloud from a letter penned by filmmaker John Waters commenting on the disbandment of the features desk. 

“Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated,” David Smith said at the very beginning of his January 2024 meeting with Sun staffers, and, for the most part, that is probably true. As A.J. Liebling had it, “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” 

Activists have, however, proven a bit more successful at hampering Smith’s plans to increase control over the city. As the nation was choosing a right-wing populist, Baltimore voters resoundingly rejected Smith and his ballot measure. 

“Baltimore is not for sale, Baltimore cannot be bought, our democracy can’t be bought,” said Mayor Brandon Scott at a press conference following the election. “No matter how many stations or newspapers you buy up.”