How Will The Sun Set?

February 22, 2024 Michael Olesker

The Baltimore Sun's former headquarters in South Baltimore's Port Covington neighborhood. (File photo)

In a conversation with Stewart Bainum just before he breathed life into The Baltimore Banner and commenced direct competition with The Sun, I offered him a sense of perspective from my time in the news business.

“When you take on The Sun,” I said, “you have one big thing going for you. Lots of people in Baltimore respect the paper. But nobody loves it.”

I said that as a mark of respect for my old paper. Until a cowardly corporate mob began pushing hundreds of newsroom bodies off the roof, The Sun was one of America’s most admired newspapers.

Bainum, a former state legislator and a guy with a lot of money from his family’s hotel business, has roots in Montgomery County. To folks in the D.C. suburbs, life in Baltimore seems distant as a foreign country.

Bainum looked surprised at my remark, but there were a couple other Baltimoreans in the room, and they nodded their heads.

The Sun wasn’t lovable because it had a record, going back to 1837, of angering people of any conceivable political persuasion on any given day. That’s because the people who ran the place always insisted on telling the news as fairly as they could, even if some readers’ feelings got hurt. The paper didn’t pander to special interest groups, and they didn’t bend the facts to support their opinion pieces.

And they had plenty of clearly marked opinions, even when it ticked off their own editors. When I got there in February of 1979, the first column I wrote took shots at the paper’s daily coverage.

The Sun’s editors liked to boast about the bureaus they had all over the world. I wrote, “The Sun tells us all they know about South Africa but misses every nuance about life in South Baltimore.”

And the piece ran. Big deal, the paper was showing it could take a small punch. They were certainly throwing enough punches of their own. One day, the paper was ticking off liberals, the next day conservatives.

But the goal was always the same: aim for the truth, even when it got some people angry. When a news operation tells the truth, it enables a community to look at itself with clear eyes. And today’s Baltimore is losing its sense of self as it loses the voice of a once-great newspaper.

Now comes the stunning news that ownership of The Sun has changed hands. In January, David D. Smith purchased the paper. He is executive chairman of the Sinclair Broadcasting chain, known for heavy-handedly slipping its conservative politics into the body of its allegedly balanced news coverage.

Brace yourself, Baltimore.

On the day Smith’s purchase of The Sun was announced, he met for three hours with much of the paper’s news staff. He told them he’d only read The Sun “four times” in recent months. He said he hadn’t read newspapers for decades and that the paper should be more like Sinclair’s hometown TV station, the conservative Fox 45.

Sinclair has nearly 200 TV operations all over the country, though Smith’s purchase of The Sun is strictly his own deal and money.

Much of his new staff knew Smith’s take on journalism before meeting him. He once told Donald Trump, “We are here to deliver your message.” He’s been slammed by journalists for requiring his stations to broadcast conservative video packages and requiring anchors to read prepared scripts containing pro-Trump editorial content.

The folks who run Pravda must have heard about this and said, “From him, we could learn.”

Here’s something to keep in mind. Sun staffers who attended that first meeting with Smith described it as “bleak” and “very bad.” Several described it as “insulting.”

The Sun Guild issued a statement, declaring, “The editorial direction that [Smith] described — focused on clicks rather than journalistic value — concerned many of our members, as did his attitude toward vulnerable communities in the city that we love.”

Those reactions were reported the next morning — in The Banner and on various broadcast outlets.

But there wasn’t a word in The Sun.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press).