From Jay Rosen’s blog:

“All we know is that we’ve invited one guest, Sen. John Kerry. We’ve made no other offers to anyone else.” People complaining about Sinclair’s decision ought to realize there hasn’t been any decision, he said. “If John Kerry sat down with us for two hours, we may end up with a 60-minute program that has 57 minutes of John Kerry presenting his side of the issues,” Hyman told the Newshour. “That’s fine. That’s what this is all about. We’ve made an open invitation.”

Sinclair has made no commitment to run the film. It wants Kerry to answer the POW’s. “We want to put his view on the air,” he said. “Putting on a few clips of what the allegations are, that will satisfy the concerns.” Have you seen any press accounts highlighting that quote? I have not.

What Mark Hyman has been saying to the point of braying it is– nothing’s firm, let’s negotiate. John Kerry can keep the documentary off the air by replacing it with himself. (And why not? Then it’s like appearing on any other “show.”) Sinclair has no other invitations out. So I say send Mike McCurry and Richard Holbrooke to Baltimore. Let them negotiate. Five minutes of film, 55 minutes of Kerry responding to questions sounds about right to me.

It doesn’t sound right to me. Essentially what is being done is that Kerry is being blackmailed, extorted into making an appearance on hostile ground, where the topic will be decided by people who hate him. Either that or allow Bush to get a free evening of anti-Kerry ads broadcast to a quarter of the nation just before the election.

As Heinlein once pointed out, the best way to find out if a deal is fair or not is to reverse it. Have a major network broadcast a rabid anti-Bush film for free just before the election, and the only way for Bush to be able to stop it would be to get him to appear in a live one-hour discussion/debate with Al Franken on any topic Franken pleases, like “did you use cocaine?” or “the lies of George W. Bush.”

Do you think that the Republicans would sit still for that? Hell, no. They would be apoplectic. No matter how much Al Franken protests that he “just wants to put Bush’s views on the air,” they would call it the biggest dirty trick of all time, an abomination–and they would be right. (Though admittedly, I’d love the hell out of it.) So how’s it fair to Kerry?

Sure, Kerry could potentially turn it to his advantage and debate Hyman or whomever else into the ground. But it is far more likely that Kerry would exposed to mostly smears and would be on the defensive most of the time–highly unappealing–and might even be seen as weak for letting himself be cornered like that.

No, the only fair solution is not to allow Sinclair to violate FEC laws in the first place. You might ask, where’s the line between free-speech editorializing and violation of campaign finance laws? I think that this case is clearly over the line–if you allow one individual to buy essentially a multi-million dollar broadcast to attack one candidate, then you open the doors for the airwaves to be filled with dreck like that, from both sides, next time out (or even this time), making a complete joke of campaign finance laws because whomever wins will be indebted to the broadcaster as clearly as if the broadcaster had put millions of dollars into the candidate’s palm. And I won’t accept the idea of ‘let it happen this once then its over,’ or even ‘let each side get a shot off.’ The very principle at stake here is highly important.

This one isn’t even close.