Well, it seems that the protest against the Sinclair broadcast intended to smear Kerry was successful; at least from the far-right perspective of Freepers, judging from their strangled, frustrated whining, the show was relatively balanced. Their bald ambition to have it be a savage attack on Kerry is undisguised:

Seriously though, I’m mad. This is stupid, and it’s not making Kerry look bad. Then they showed a little hit piece on President Bush. Did Sinclair cave or what??——————This thing sucks. Anything postive for the POWs and vets is “BALANCED” by whack jobs for kerry. Now they’re doing the Bush AWOL thing – I am blocking SINclair on my box – what a setup! – It’s on tape but I think I’ll burn it. ARRRRRRRRRRRGH!——————Sinclair is apparently a bunch of linguini-spined cowards who decided to chop up the documentary and insert so much cognitive dissonance as to make it useless. Shame on them! SHAME!

Hee hee, that’s fun to read. Serves ’em right. This is the same crowd that howled bloody murder when the Reagan miniseries was to show–getting it bumped to cable–and that wasn’t about a candidate and it wasn’t two weeks before an election. With that miniseries, as you’ll recall, Republicans demanded to screen the miniseries beforehand, and if they didn’t like it, then they would demand a scrolling subtitle be constantly shown to emphasize that the series was fiction. Not so it would be balanced, but so it would be either sympathetic to their views or fully discredited as untrue. If they can justify that but then rail against this, they are quite clearly raving hypocrites.

Clearly the pressure put on Sinclair was effective. After their stock fell and their advertisers scattered, they announced that they were planning a “balanced” show after all–but no one doubts that if not for the protest, they would have shown only the smear documentary, possibly followed by a panel show, as they had originally announced. But even then there would have been the question of legality; it might have been more than fear of losing sponsors, if Sinclair had aired the anti-Kerry doc as originally planned, they could have been hit with lawsuits and possibly even lost their license.

It should also be noted that maybe the show wasn’t quite son easy on Kerry as the Freepers feared; after all, their wing-nut view may just make them feel that the show wasn’t an anti-Kerry screed; one of them points out, “It doesn’t suck; it’s just not slash and burn. Try to remember that the rest of the world isn’t quite as strident about John Kerry as we are.” To say the least.

It’ll be interesting to see what the non-far-right-loony reaction is. But reading through the hundreds of posts by screaming, outraged Freepers is fun.