The Baltimore Sun Newspaper’s New Conservative Owner Is Causing The Left To Freak Out

Sinclair Broadcasting Chain chairman David D. Smith recently bought out the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

However, the transition in ownership has not gone as smoothly as you might think.

David D. Smith, who has supported conservatives in the past, has met with backlash from leftists who fear a conservative running a newspaper company.

Here’s one example:

Very bad news.
Sinclair Broadcasting has bought the Baltimore Sun.
Damn it to hell.
Just call the Sun Fox News now.
Bad Bad news for News in Maryland.

David Smith is creating a huge monopoly. I thought we had laws against exactly this kind of thinghttps://t.co/nAQXeDRJKc

— P. (@dezgn4u) January 16, 2024

The mainstream media has also called attention to the purchase and their fears of the new leadership.

Read what the Associated Press News has to say about the purchase:

Smith serves as executive chairman of the Maryland-based Sinclair Broadcasting Inc., which owns or operates 185 local television stations across the country and is known for infusing a right-wing sensibility into its news products. In 2018, the company ordered its anchors across the country to read a statement that largely echoed what former President Donald Trump had said about “fake news.”

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The company was founded as the Chesapeake Television Corp. by Smith’s father, Julian Sinclair Smith, and changed its name to Sinclair in the 1980s as it began expanding nationally.

Smith made clear that he used his personal resources to purchase The Sun, which will not fall under the Sinclair umbrella and will be under local ownership for the first time in 38 years. Smith told the newspaper he had one partner: Armstrong Williams, a commentator who hosts a show on Sinclair’s affiliates.

The Sinclair-owned Fox station in Baltimore frequently airs coverage blaming the city’s Democratic mayor, Brandon Scott, for gun violence and failing schools. And Smith has become a prominent player in local politics. In 2022, he helped finance an effort to impose term limits for some Baltimore officials.

The leftist mainstream media fears the idea that a conservative owns a newspaper company.

They know it means that their grip on the media is loosening.

Just read more meltdowns here:

Breaks my heart. Sinclair chairman David Smith, a Trump-adjacent jerk who runs Sinclair Broadcast, basically the "Fox" of local broadcast news, incl. Fox 45, has bought The Sun.https://t.co/6R2UpbYrSe

— Jay Hancock (@jayhancock1) January 16, 2024

The Washington Post writes more about the internal conflict that The Baltimore Sun is now facing:

If the employees of the Baltimore Sun were expecting a charm offensive from its out-of-the-blue new owner, they sure didn’t get one.

“Full disclosure, I haven’t read the newspaper in 40 years,” David D. Smith, a television executive andlifelong resident of the Baltimore area, told the 60 staffers who crowded into a conference room at lunchtime Tuesday.

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“Literally have not read the newspaper. … I read the paper maybe four times since I started working on trying to buy this place,” Smith said, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The Washington Post.

Regardless, Smith seemed to have strong opinions — negative ones — about the Sun and the fleet of suburban papers he purchased alongside it, which he laid out in a tense, 2½-hour meeting that left many staffers baffled about the multimillionaire’s intentions for the city’s 186-year-old newspaper.

He suggested that the Sun overlooks the stories readers crave about crime and government dysfunction. (Retorted one journalist: “We’re a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom,” most recently in 2020,for a fraud investigation that forced the mayor to resign.) He stood by a 2018 interview in which he called print media “meaningless dribble.” And, when pressed, he said he mostly thought the same of the Sun.

Here is a clip of the coverage provided by CBS News Baltimore: