After stirring up protest over its plans to broadcast a documentary critical of Senator John Kerry, the Sinclair Broadcast Group presented a program on Friday night that gave short shrift to that film and offered instead a measured analysis of the debate over Kerry's Vietnam War record.
The hour-long special program, produced by the news department at Sinclair, a major financial supporter of Republican candidates, included as many backers of Kerry as critics.
Sinclair's producers seemed to go out of their way to create a balanced political collage in the special, called A POW Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media.
Only about four minutes of Carlton Sherwood's anti-Kerry film, Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal, were included -- and virtually the same amount of time was devoted to an excerpt from Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, a film by George Butler that presents Kerry as a war hero.
The program was apparently balanced enough to satisfy a consortium of media watchdog groups, which held a telephone news conference on Friday night to say Sinclair had acted responsibly. It also enraged a number of conservative viewers who tuned in expecting to see an hour of attacks on Kerry.
The prevailing theme of conservative viewers, as expressed on Internet Web logs and chat rooms on Friday night, was that Sinclair, the nation's largest local TV station owner, had backed down as it saw its stock price plummet and came under intense heat from shareholder groups and advertisers for put-ting the company's political views ahead of its business interests.
Sinclair executives originally fiercely defended the right to broadcast the film, which accuses Kerry of making false statements about soldiers' atrocities and contends that those statements prolonged the captivity of US prisoners of war in Vietnam.
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