Porn and the rightwing media -- it's Sinclair's turn

Watching the outing of the Pseudo-Journalist Formerly Known as Jeff Gannon has been so much fun that we briefly forgot about the dual tragedies of Nov. 2 and Feb. 6. But we want you to know that Jimmy Dale Guckert isn't the only rightwing media type to have a link to the pornography industry.

Remember David Smith and his Sinclair Broadcast Group? You know, the company with 51 far-flung TV stations, who wouldn't show the "Nightline" honoring the war dead and who tried to get the anti-John Kerry documentary on the air just days before the election. Some of us had a good time with Smith's 1996 bust after an encounter-on-wheels with a prostitute in a seedy district of Baltimore.

Now it gets better (or worse). A former partner is giving Rolling Stone -- in this excellent new article by Eric Klinenberg about the bizarro right-wing world of Sinclair -- new details about Sinclair CEO Smith's start in the world of business, which was ...copying porno films! And the first one was "Deep Throat." (not that one....this one). Check out what the article says:

Smith had some experience in the media when he took over the company from his father -- but it wasn't the kind of work most conservatives would appreciate. In the 1970s, he was a partner in a business called Cine Processors, which made bootleg copies of porn films in the basement of a building owned by another of his father's companies, the Commercial Radio Institute. "We had the film-processing lab in operation for, like, a year," recalls David Williams, Smith's partner at Cine. "The first film we copied was Deep Throat, which had just opened in New York and was not available anywhere else." According to Williams, Cine got involved with the mob and was busted by the police. "How David got control of the family company after that, I don't know," he says. "He was just a big egotist. He wanted attention."

The Rolling Stone article amplifies some information that was first reported in the Los Angeles Times last October, in the week before the election when it was buried in the avalanche of pre-election news. We're glad to see Rolling Stone getting it back out there, especially right on the heels of the Guckert affair. It almost seems like to become a media mouthpiece for the "family values" GOP, you have to first take the Hypocritic Oath.