Former Sinclair Reporter Speaks Out Working For the Evil Empire
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Suri Crowe was a Reporter for Sinclair owned WSET in Lynchburg, VA.
She has gone on the record about working for a station owned by Sinclair.
Crowe talked to Buzzfeed and mentioned an incident in 2015. She was working on a story about man-made climate change and says that she was told to “balance” her stories in a more conservative direction by her boss.
She says the former news director of WSET, Len Stevens, criticized her reporting because she “clearly laid out the argument that human activities cause global warming, but had nothing from the side that questions the science behind such claims and points to more natural causes for such warming.”
Crowe told BuzzFeed News that before the October 2015 climate change segment aired, she was ordered by Stevens to include Donald Trump’s opinion on the matter. “When I instructed you to balance the story, by including some of [the] other argument, you insisted there was no need to add such balance to the story,” he wrote in her Jan. 22, 2016, performance review.
A veteran reporter who has worked at news stations in Texas and Virginia, Crowe said she viewed the story as environmental — not two-sided or political. “I was always covering the flu. I don’t remember a time when for balance I went out to a group of 20 people who are nutjobs that say flu shots kill,” she told BuzzFeed News.
The scientific consensus is that climate change is real and humans are largely to blame, but Crowe ultimately read the updated, “balanced” script on air. “That was the moment where I realized how things were going to go there,” she said.
She said that her Sinclair experience as a Reporter demonstrates how the parent company’s ideology can permeate throughout local news reporting.
She faced discipline for social media posts and restrictions in reporting on guns, white nationalism, and Liberty University, she said. Company documents do criticize some of her work as unfair and her behavior as unprofessional at times. Overall, the documents provide an unusually close look at one reporter’s experience working for a Sinclair station, and how the smallest details mattered and were recorded.
Stevens, the news director from the Allbritton and early Sinclair era, joined Liberty University when he left WSET in 2016. But Crowe continued to feud with the new management, including news director Scott Nichols.
Last year, Crowe’s contract was not renewed and she was forced out of WSET. “We do not comment on individual cases regarding past employees,” said Ronn Torossian, a spokesperson for Sinclair. “We do always maintain high standards for balanced, fact-based reporting.”
“After I left, I just didn’t want to go back to news,” Crowe said. “Now I feel like I’m more committed to journalism than ever. We really have to fight for journalism — it’s worth the fight.”
Toward the end of the contract, Crowe said she was whisked into a room and told that the company had exercised an escape hatch to force her out early. It was her last day at Sinclair and, as it happened, her last day in the news business. She now works in the health and fitness industry.
“I believe the ire at me was politically tainted,” Crowe said. “If they perceived you as a liberal, or someone not going along with that whole credo, then you are done.”
H/T Buzzfeed
