The Reporter Who Graded His Own Homework

Aug 14

THE DISPATCH — CIVIC EDUCATION

A Trump-aligned billionaire owns Maryland's biggest newspaper. This year it started building a case against the governor. Here's how to tell journalism from a campaign.

Imagine a company spent months building a case against a public official, staffed it with a former political party official and a company executive instead of trained reporters, and then let the lead investigator publish a rebuttal to his own critics in the same outlet. That's not a hypothetical. It's what's been happening at The Baltimore Sun this year, and it's worth understanding regardless of how you feel about the official in question.

That might sound like an inside-baseball media story, far removed from your daily life. It's not. It's about who decides what counts as news in your state, and whether you can tell the difference when a newsroom stops being neutral.

FIRST: WHAT IS EDITORIAL INDEPENDENCE, AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Think about a referee at your kid's basketball game. Even if the ref's own child is on one of the teams, we expect them to call the game fairly, because that's the whole point of having a referee. Editorial independence works the same way in a newsroom. An owner can have opinions, donate to campaigns, even dislike a public official personally. But readers rely on a wall between the owner's interests and what reporters are told to cover, and how. When that wall comes down, you're no longer reading a referee's call. You're reading one team's version of the game.

WHAT HAPPENED

The Baltimore Sun, Maryland's largest newspaper, was bought in 2024 by David D. Smith, the executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the largest owners of local TV stations in the country. Starting last fall, a Sinclair-founded reporting consortium called Spotlight on Maryland began building an investigation into Governor Wes Moore's account of his military service in Afghanistan two decades ago, questioning whether he embellished his role and misrepresented a Bronze Star he later received.

The team leading that investigation isn't made up of Sun staff reporters. The lead reporter is a former vice-chairman of the Maryland Republican Party. The lead analyst is a retired Army colonel who now runs a Sinclair technology subsidiary, working alongside Sinclair's chief of security. Emails to Moore's office grew pointed, at one point warning the team was prepared to take its findings to the Secretary of the Army. The series editor separately wrote to members of Congress asking whether the matter warranted a formal inquiry. Then, on August 6, the Sun's letters-to-the-editor page ran a rebuttal to a critic written by the lead analyst himself, defending his own reporting. A former Sun columnist of nearly 50 years said staff writers were never previously allowed to respond to letters that way.

Separately, Smith is suing Governor Moore for defamation over comments Moore made this summer tying Smith to Jeffrey Epstein-linked investment funds. That lawsuit is ongoing.

WHAT SUPPORTERS OF THE COVERAGE SAY

Smith and Sinclair have not commented publicly on most specifics, but the underlying journalistic question isn't manufactured. Moore did claim a Bronze Star on a 2006 fellowship application before it was formally awarded, and didn't correct interviewers who called him a recipient for years afterward. Elected officials, especially ones eyeing higher office, invite scrutiny of how they describe their own record, and outlets like the Washington Free Beacon have argued Moore is trying to shut down legitimate accountability reporting by attacking the messenger.

WHAT CRITICS SAY

Moore and several former Sun journalists argue this isn't ordinary accountability journalism. They point to the makeup of the team (a former party official and a company executive doing the reporting instead of trained journalists), the aggressive tone of outreach to Moore's office, the choice to escalate to Congress and the Army rather than simply publish and let readers judge, and the highly unusual decision to let the story's own author defend it in the letters page. They also note this fits a broader pattern. Sinclair has a two-decade record of using its stations to advantage Republican candidates, from a shelved anti-Kerry documentary in 2004, to a swing-state special critical of President Obama in 2012, to a 2018 video of dozens of local anchors reading an identical script echoing Donald Trump's "fake news" language, to pulling Jimmy Kimmel's show off its stations last fall over his comments on Charlie Kirk's murder.

WHAT WE DON'T KNOW YET

The defamation lawsuit between Smith and Moore is unresolved. It isn't yet clear whether other independent outlets will corroborate or challenge Spotlight on Maryland's specific findings, or whether more stories in the series are coming before Moore's re-election race concludes this November.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Get your news about Maryland politics from more than one outlet, and check who owns each one. A quick search for "who owns [outlet]" takes thirty seconds and can change how you read a story.
Read past the headline. In this case, several of the underlying facts are accurate even where the framing around them is contested. Good media literacy means being able to hold both at once.
Show up. Local, independent civic organizing is one of the best counterweights to a captured media environment. Come to a GTC Circle Up hub meeting or a Dispatch event to talk through stories like this one with your neighbors.

Want to read the original reporting this piece draws from?

Read the Full Investigation →

Chris Esters