I don’t have to imagine the courage because I’ve seen it myself

Lots of commentary about the Sinclair Broadcast Group anchors and reporters and how they’re being “forced” to broadcast these stories and read the company’s scripted propaganda. I used the word forced in my own initial post. Let me amend that.

I feel for these people, but they are not being forced. They are choosing to for fear of their jobs. There’s a distinction worth making there.

My dad, grandpa, and great-grandpa struck for months at a time when they were coal miners. My great-grandpa helped organize Southern Illinois and was shot at for his trouble. They risked their jobs and more to push back against management and to do what they thought was right. It came at a real cost, and it must have been difficult emotionally to decide to take those risks. News anchors and reporters have kids to feed, of course, but so do a lot of other people who come to other conclusions every day.

I don’t have to imagine the courage that would take because I’ve seen it myself.

Options are available to all of those people. In fact, one of their colleagues took a different approach as far back as 2004. Sinclair fired its DC bureau chief soon after he spoke out about the John Kerry swift boat “documentary”/slander that Sinclair ran during that presidential election.

“I knew this was a possible consequence,” John Leiberman said soon after he was fired. “I really wanted them to just change the ways that they do things. I’ve been telling them for months that they need to change the way they do things…[I] just basically said, ‘I don’t want to be a part of it.’”