Baltimore Fights the Proper-Wing Takeover of The Baltimore Solar

Though Elon Musk’s quixotic buy of Twitter, which he redubbed X, appears to have performed a major function in giving him full and unfettered entry to the gears of presidency, one right-wing wealthy man’s buy of a media firm didn’t lead to his desired electoral consequence final yr. Putative billionaire David D. Smith, Sinclair Broadcast Group’s govt chair, purchased The Baltimore Solar in January 2024 and, but, his candidates within the major and a poll initiative that he solely funded had been resoundingly defeated by voters in Baltimore. 

The measure sought to cut back the scale of Baltimore’s Metropolis Council from 14 to eight. Voters seemingly rejected the measure not even though Smith promoted the problem on Fox 45, the crown jewel of Sinclair’s empire of native TV stations, and in The Baltimore Solar, however due to it. (Sinclair Broadcast Group, a publicly traded firm, has repeatedly distanced itself from Smith’s activist measures and was not concerned within the buy of The Baltimore Solar.)

Smith grew up in Baltimore, and he and his household have enterprise pursuits across the metropolis, together with a automobile dealership, a restaurant group, and even a hashish firm. However Smith — whose Sinclair Broadcast is positioned, like his residence, within the county, exterior of metropolis limits — has the sensibility of a county resident who likes to hate town. His media properties domesticate an identical viewers. The Solar, beneath Smith’s possession, shortly confirmed indicators of this editorial bent, main many staffers to revolt. 

“We’re right here at this time as a result of our union members are watching distressing adjustments play out on the pages of our personal newspaper,” stated Christine Condon, the unit rep of the Baltimore Solar Guild, at an August lunch-time protest. “The Solar started publishing articles from his firm, Sinclair Broadcasting, together with thinly reported tales based mostly on partisan speaking factors,” Condon continued. 

In a assertion, the Guild cited a narrative utilizing the time period “unlawful immigrants,” which “isn’t utilized in The Solar, per business finest practices from the Related Press, which don’t condone referring to folks as ‘unlawful,’” and an op-ed written by part-owner Armstrong Williams equating the “transgender motion” with “most cancers.”

Smith and the almost 200 native tv stations managed by Sinclair have lengthy performed an outsized function in each nationwide and native politics — exactly by seeming to not. The enterprise and political innovation that units Smith and Sinclair aside from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Information is that Sinclair owns stations affiliated with all the foremost — and lots of minor — networks. There isn’t a huge Sinclair brand to alert viewers to right-wing content material. As an alternative, it comes by the mouthpiece of trusted native information anchors on ABC, NBC, or CBS, who inform you concerning the climate or the highschool soccer recreation alongside right-wing speaking factors about crime, failing public faculties, immigration, homelessness, and variety initiatives. 

“You have got a solution to get right-wing MAGA speaking factors within the mouths of your anchors,” says David Zurawik, CNN commentator and former media critic for the Solar, “and it has far more resonance.” 

Research again Zurawik up, discovering that People place far higher belief in native information than they do nationwide information. 

“Our purpose at Sinclair is to offer balanced and complete protection of stories that’s related to our viewers,” Jessica Bellucci, a spokesperson wrote in an announcement. “Our goal is to offer correct and well timed protection reflecting the variety and complexity of the communities we serve. That is the one message we search to ship.” 

Lengthy earlier than the arrival of Donald Trump’s political motion, Smith experimented with the political energy of native information. In 2004, Sinclair directed all of its stations to air interviews and commentary by conservative media determine and now Baltimore Solar co-owner Armstrong Williams; the Bush administration had paid Williams $240,000 to advertise their instructional insurance policies. Sinclair pressured its stations to air a pledge of assist for President Bush and refused to broadcast a Nightline episode that named those that died within the Iraq Battle, whereas bringing nationwide consideration to Stolen Honor, a “documentary” meant to solid doubt on John Kerry’s struggle service. In 2005, an ex-producer informed Rolling Stone he was ordered to not air “any unhealthy information out of Iraq — no useless servicemen, no studies on how a lot we’re spending, nothing.” 

This effort was redoubled within the Trump period. In 2016, in accordance with Jared Kushner, the Trump marketing campaign struck a take care of Sinclair buying and selling uncritical protection for entry. Whereas Smith denied this was something aside from a typical journalistic follow, he stated he informed Trump straight: “We’re right here to ship your message. Interval.”

This was a kind of inflection level when some folks got here to understand Sinclair as a sinister nationwide pressure, when Deadspin made a superb supercut of the corporate’s native anchors everywhere in the nation, repeating Sinclair’s script about “faux information,” and John Oliver devoted a phase of Final Week Tonight. 

The lovefest between Smith and Trump was mutual. After a long-expected merger between Sinclair and Tribune Media, which might have put Sinclair stations into near 75 p.c of American properties, was quashed in 2018 by the Federal Communications Fee within the wake of public stress and Sinclair’s refusal to divest any stations in locations had been they’d personal too many networks, then-President Trump tweeted: “So unhappy and unfair that the FCC wouldn’t approve the Sinclair Broadcast merger with Tribune. This could have been an ideal and far wanted Conservative voice for and of the Folks.”

Although the function of Sinclair within the presidential election and the brand new Trump administration received’t be clear for a while, Smith’s renewed involvement within the native politics of Baltimore, mixed along with his January 2024 buy of The Baltimore Solar, town’s paper of document, signifies a brand new entrance in Smith’s marketing campaign to make use of his media shops to affect and never simply report on politics. 

However Smith’s growing involvement in native politics has sparked a backlash from town’s political class, its activists, and from throughout the paper itself, whereas leaving long-time readers each unhappy and offended.

“The Baltimore Solar is an element and parcel of Baltimore Metropolis. What the hell enterprise is it of [Smith’s] to tear up an establishment that has meant a lot,” says Baltimore resident and life-long subscriber Donna Beth Pleasure Shapiro, who says she has learn the Solar in print each day for the final 60 years. “The few instances that I used to be out of city, I might learn it in print after I received residence.”

Now, nonetheless, she says, “I learn it beneath protest typically.”

Others are giving up their subscriptions altogether. Subscription knowledge isn’t publicly obtainable however when a staffer requested Smith what number of subscribers the paper has misplaced since he purchased it, he replied by saying that he didn’t know, however that “on a relative foundation” the quantity is “immaterial in comparison with what you’ve misplaced within the final three years.”

At press time, greater than 20 members of the Solar’s union have left the paper since Smith purchased the paper. 

Smith’s solely response to Rolling Stone’s repeated requests for remark was a hearty “Not !”

THE BALTIMORE SUN was as soon as one among America’s nice newspapers, the house of H.L. Mencken, Laura Lippman, David Simon, Russell Baker, and quite a few Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters and editors. When A.S. Abell based it in 1837, it was a part of a wave of “penny papers,” which did greater than the rest to invent the trendy thought of unaffiliated, goal newspaper journalism in America. Earlier than that, many of the papers had been occasion organs, however Abell realized he might make much more cash if the paper offered to all events, therefore the slogan “Gentle for All.” 

Smith’s buy of the Solar may nicely stick the fork within the cooked carcass of that mannequin. “If you consider it, the concept of the unaligned skilled press had a really brief shelf-life in American political historical past,” says David Simon, creator of The Wire and several other different HBO reveals, and a veteran Solar reporter who got here in to the paper in 1983, simply earlier than the Abell household offered to the primary of a sequence of newspaper chains. “This was at all times the satan to be resisted. It was a temptation to not play the kingmaker or put your hand on the scales.”

Slightly than a temptation to be resisted, the power to play kingmaker appears to be the explanation Smith purchased the Solar. On the time of the acquisition, the Solar had handed by a number of out-of-town house owners and was held by the vulture capitalist hedge fund Alden Capital. The editor, Trif Alatzas, can also be the writer, so there was no firewall between the enterprise and editorial aspect of the paper for near a decade. (For full disclosure, I labored at Baltimore Metropolis Paper, when the Solar purchased it in 2014, solely to shut it in 2017). Alatzas has not returned repeated messages requesting remark. 

Like so many American dailies, by the point Smith got here alongside, the Solar was already a shell of what it had as soon as been, and lots of of its journalists had fled for the Baltimore Banner, a brand new on-line, nonprofit began by Maryland hotelier Stewart W. Bainum Jr., who had beforehand tried to purchase the Solar. However, nonetheless, the remaining workers members had been devastated once they realized who their new boss could be. 

“It’s like, we’ve been owned by a hedge fund this entire time after which we get bought by someone native after which this is the individual,” says one of many many staffers we spoke to for this story who want to stay nameless for concern of retaliation. 

“He was constructed for the function of evil new chief of any group,” says one other journalist of their first impression. 

“We’d like an actual dedication to uphold the journalistic requirements that Solar journalists have worn as a badge of honor by all my time on the paper, even after we had been being downsized by companies and deserted by advertisers,” stated Dan Rodricks, who has been a reporter and columnist on the paper for 48 years, on the lunch-time protest in August. Rodricks has since introduced his retirement. 

They received the alternative. Simply after the sale was introduced, Smith held an extended assembly with Solar staffers the place he outlined his imaginative and prescient for the paper. 

“You’ll grow to be within the ballot enterprise. You’ll do polls each day, if not common foundation, on the entrance web page of the paper it would say ‘please go to your web site or no matter it’s and vote on the next situation,” Smith informed the staffers within the January 2024 assembly, tapes of which Rolling Stone has reviewed. 

“We ask quite simple questions,” Smith says. “What’s it you’re most afraid of?” 

It’s a method in good alignment with Trump: Inform us what it’s you’re most afraid of and we’ll promote it again to you. This concern usually comes with a wholesome dose of racism, as a result of, for white Baltimore county residents who watch a number of Sinclair, Baltimore’s Black children are one of many issues they’re most afraid of and Fox 45 stokes that concern, treating crowds of Black folks as an inherent risk and, in no less than one egregious case, falsely modifying video. 

“What they’re doing is that they’re elevating narratives that feed on sure societal tropes round notions of inherent black criminality,” says Dayvon Love, the political director of “grass-roots assume tank” Leaders of a Lovely Wrestle. “They’re doing it on such a constant foundation, over and again and again of their protection, in a method that I believe causes folks to… consider that black individuals are inherently legal.” 

Headlines such because the current “Residents annoyed by crime, some contemplating a brand new deal with,” take an remoted incident and blow it up right into a disaster, despite the fact that crime goes down. In one other story, printed the following day, the community prominently options mug pictures of two Black people who had been charged with stealing a catalytic converter in December. 

A 2024 research by the Sentencing Undertaking backs this up, by way of protection of youth crime (wherein Black youths are far over-represented) discovering that “Fox 45 aired much more protection of youth crime, and whole crime, than the opposite 5 shops [that were studied in Baltimore]. Total, Fox45 ran 1,119 crime tales through the first six months of 2024,” whereas “three information stations and the Baltimore Banner every produced round 300 crime tales.” The research discovered, the truth is: “Throughout the 6-month research interval, Fox 45 aired extra tales about youth offending that included fear-inducing rhetoric or alleged a rise in youth crime charges (40) than the opposite 5 media shops mixed (35).”

Love sees in these numbers a coverage advocacy place. 

“There’s this protection of crime in Baltimore, then the pure inclination is there must be extra legal guidelines which are more durable,” says Love, including that the Solar “is one other car to perpetuate that.”

The Sentencing Undertaking research helps this declare, noting that “Fox45 protection of youth crime was usually offered in methods more likely to stoke public fears of youth crime and discontent with present youth justice insurance policies.”

Lengthy earlier than Smith’s buy of the paper, the Solar had been criticized — and in the end apologized — for racist protection, however ex-staffers, who thought the paper was bettering with reference to race, lament that the paper might now observe Sinclair in “concentrating on Baltimore Metropolis to fulfill a bigoted suburban viewers,” within the phrases of John McIntyre, a former long-time copy editor on the Solar.

However no less than one outstanding member of Baltimore’s Black group doesn’t agree with this evaluation of Smith’s priorities. 

“I actually don’t see this hyper-racist label that’s positioned on him,” says outstanding Black pastor and activist Al Hathaway, who has recognized Smith since they went to Baltimore Metropolis Faculty Excessive College collectively within the Sixties. “I simply don’t see him as racist.”

AROUND THE TIME David Smith purchased the Solar, he gave over $100,000 to a PAC meant to “assist Sheila Dixon” for mayor towards the incumbent, Brandon Scott, who’s younger, progressive, and Black. Fox 45 has been waging struggle on Scott’s administration since 2020, when he received the workplace. Extra money flowed in from Smith’s prolonged household, particularly his nephews, Alex and Eric Smith, who run the Atlas Restaurant group.

“Traditionally, there was this power-brokering crew, primarily of rich, wealthy white males… who would get right into a room and resolve who the mayor could be, and that they’d count on that individual to then give favor to them and their ideologies and all of these issues,” Mayor Scott tells Rolling Stone. “David Smith, he and Sinclair come after me, as a result of I’ve made it very clear that I wouldn’t be somebody to hold their water, and I wouldn’t parrot their factors of views and perform their insurance policies.”

Dixon, a Black girl and former mayor who resigned as a part of a plea deal to resolve a corruption scandal in 2010, has remained well-liked and virtually beat Scott in 2020. Former Councilman, and good friend of Smith’s, Carl Stokes, informed the Baltimore Brew, and confirmed for Rolling Stone, that Smith referred to as him to ask about Dixon. “David says to me, ‘I don’t know Sheila. Are you able to introduce me? I received a proposition. I wish to put collectively 10-12 folks and provides Dixon sufficient cash to win the race.”

Dixon denies agreeing to any phrases or being “buddy buddy” with Smith. “We had a gathering with different folks, different mutual enterprise people who I do know that I had enterprise with over time, one time, however aside from that, he didn’t have management of my marketing campaign,” she tells Rolling Stone. 

Nonetheless, Dixon appeared to embrace lots of Smith’s pet points, resembling firing the Baltimore Metropolis Faculties CEO, and Dixon started making common appearances on Fox 45, whose polls had her profitable by a cushty margin. Folks working in Metropolis Corridor had been getting nervous. After which, on major day, in what felt virtually like a referendum on Smith, cash wasn’t the “grease to make issues occur,” as Smith likes to say. It simply received everybody concerned all greasy. 

Not solely did Sheila Dixon, Smith’s chosen mayoral candidate, lose to Smith’s nemesis, incumbent Brandon Scott, however the entire slate of candidates who had been perceived as Smith’s picks received their pants handed to them, regardless of the mixed energy of the Solar and Fox 45. 

Kendrick Lamar’s brutal diss of Drake, “Not Like Us,” blasted from the audio system as Brandon Scott walked out for a victory speech. 

“We overcame the percentages, together with a Trump-loving Republican Tremendous PAC that spent a whole bunch of 1000’s of {dollars} telling lies about our metropolis, ignoring the progress that we now have talked about, and we nonetheless received,” Scott stated. “Baltimore, tonight you stated very clearly that your democracy isn’t on the market, regardless of how wealthy they’re.”

Although his candidates misplaced within the major, Smith nonetheless had the poll measure within the normal election. Designed to drastically shrink the Metropolis Council, the measure was seen by some, within the phrases of Leaders of a Lovely Wrestle, as an effort “to undermine Black political energy in Baltimore.”

“The poll initiative isn’t some scheme to consolidate energy, but when the general public helps it, it will likely be a way of decreasing waste and abuse of taxpayer cash, all whereas nonetheless making certain that Baltimoreans have sufficient illustration,” Smith wrote of the measure. He paid greater than $400,000 to get the ten,000 signatures required to place the referendum on the poll. 

The Solar employed a former Sinclair worker as “regional multimedia editor” (a place not at present a part of the Guild) to collaborate with a Fox 45 reporter on a sequence of tales concerning the ineffectuality of Metropolis Council members, tales accompanied by a “ballot” asking if Baltimore’s Metropolis Council is simply too huge. The paper additionally ran full-page advertisements in assist of the initiative. 

Smith had good motive to consider the poll measure would move. Baltimore Metropolis voters haven’t rejected a poll modification within the final 20 years, and Smith himself had been a part of a current profitable poll initiative to impose two-term limits on town’s politicians.

Hathaway, Smith’s outdated good friend and ally within the Black church, supported the term-limit initiative, however broke with Smith on the bid to shrink the council. “I don’t agree with him on decreasing the scale of town council, so I’m nowhere close to that. I don’t align myself with that. I don’t consider that,” Hathaway says. 

Mayor Scott and his allies had already realized within the major race that many individuals see Smith and his manufacturers as poisonous and they also fought the hassle to shrink metropolis council by linking the initiative extra publicly with Sinclair and Smith. Scott’s former marketing campaign supervisor arrange a “Cease Sinclair” marketing campaign.

“If folks knew that the one who runs and owns that [local] station stated out loud that his stations are Donald Trump’s mouthpiece and so they’re there to hold his message, then they’ll make the connection to how their reporting is finished each day,” Scott says. “Folks should know the way these issues intersect.”

Sinclair despatched a stop and desist letter to Leaders of a Lovely Wrestle, who had been additionally main a grassroots marketing campaign towards the poll initiative, demanding that they cease associating Sinclair, which is a publicly traded firm, with Smith’s poll measures. And, to deal with the mayor, Smith took to the op-ed web page of the paper. Jarringly, Smith begins his editorial, which bears the headline “The Battle for Reality in My Beloved Baltimore,” by quoting the German Jewish thinker and political theorist Hannah Arendt, whose “Origins of Totalitarianism,” was a lot cited by critics through the first Trump administration in a warning of creeping fascism.

Then he praised the liberty of the press, all as a result of “at this time, Baltimore is being attacked by lies from the mouths of its mayor. The Baltimore mayor has begun a marketing campaign towards Sinclair as a result of he wrongly believes that Sinclair is behind a vital poll initiative that may cut back the variety of Metropolis Council members from 14 to eight.”

Shortly after Smith’s op-ed, the paper printed one by Jovani Patterson, who runs PEACE, the Smith-funded group behind the hassle to shrink metropolis council — with no preliminary acknowledgement of the affiliation, although the disclosure was added later.

Madeleine O’Neill, a legal justice reporter, was amongst those that questioned the shortage of disclosure on the paper’s inner Slack Channel, remarking, in accordance with staffers who noticed the dialog, that this must be “Journalism 101.” O’Neill got here to the Solar after Smith bought it and, so, was nonetheless in a probationary interval and never protected by the Guild. She had been vital of different post-Smith initiatives that affected her beat, resembling a narrative about Marilyn Mosby, the previous state’s lawyer who charged police within the Freddie Grey case and is a favourite goal of Fox 45, going to a celebration whereas sentenced to residence detention on perjury expenses. Mosby had permission from a choose to attend the occasion, however that data was, at first, disregarded of the story the Solar and Fox 45 collectively ran. 

“Working this incomplete model threatened my relationship with a supply,” O’Neill wrote in a message on the Slack channel, which Rolling Stone has examined. “I can’t do my job if editors are going to undercut me like this.” 

Based on sources aware of the method, per week later, O’Neill was summoned as much as the workplace, fired, and escorted out by safety.

“David Smith is a deeply silly man, and he’s destroying an establishment filled with sensible and proficient folks *as a result of* they’re sensible and proficient and he isn’t,” she later tweeted, however on the time, she wrote solely: “I’m pleased with the reporting I did at The Baltimore Solar and I’ve no regrets.”

However, it would doubtless be more and more tough for journalists to stay on the Solar with out regrets, as each critics and odd readers start to affiliate the staff with their bosses and query both their credibility or their ethics. Zurawik, the media critic and professor, wonders how anybody might keep on on the Solar now and has particularly harsh phrases for the editors: “The people who find themselves nonetheless there, who’re the editors, are accomplices.”

Although two long-time editors left the paper after Smith purchased it, the remainder of the management appears intent on serving to him perform his agenda each throughout the paper and town at giant. 

“In the event that they’re profitable in doing it right here, they’re going to do it in each single metropolis and media-coverage space that they’re in,” Mayor Scott informed Rolling Stone in October. 

This may increasingly, the truth is, be a part of the plan. In his assembly with Solar staffers in January 2024, Smith made it clear that he was taken with buying different papers. “About 6 or 8 months in the past I attempted to purchase all of the papers within the state of Maine apart from one,” Smith informed the Solar’s workers. The proprietor of these papers in the end transferred all of the papers to the Nationwide Belief for Native Information in 2023. 

Smith’s play in Baltimore is an element of a bigger pattern the place every day papers are mere instruments within the arsenal of billionaire enterprise pursuits, as has been alleged of The Washington Submit and The Los Angeles Instances, after their ultra-wealthy house owners prevented the paper from endorsing Harris. However even earlier than that, with the hiring of editors from Rupert Murdoch’s papers, Politico wrote concerning the “Rupert Murdoch-ization of The Washington Submit.” 

Smith could also be following the mannequin of Murdoch’s New York Submit, which has been influencing native elections because the election of Ed Koch in 1978 and up by Eric Adams’ victorious marketing campaign in 2021. 

Smith is definitely making the paper extra like a tabloid than a conventional metropolitan every day. On the tape of his assembly with the Solar, Smith says moderately plainly that Fox 45 found that Joan Pratt, town’s former Comptroller, was spending most of her time on different work, by hiring personal detectives to observe her 24-hours a day — and he didn’t rule out utilizing such ways on the Solar. 

“Can we try this now?” somebody asks. “Is that on the desk?”

“Completely,” Smith says. “Because it pertains to authorities, every thing is on the desk.” 

Mark Feldstein, an investigative reporter who teaches journalistic ethics on the College of Maryland’s Philip Merrill Faculty of Journalism, says that stakeouts and surveillance aren’t irregular in investigative reporting. However, he says, “I don’t assume I’ve ever heard of a newspaper writer hiring personal eyes to do journalism.”

An enormous concern is one among ethics, as a result of “personal eyes aren’t essentially skilled within the requirements and practices of journalistic ethics,” he says. “Tabloids do this sort of stuff. Tabloids additionally pay sources for data.” Mainstream papers don’t. 

The transformation may very well be like what occurred to AM radio after the arrival of FM, ceding virtually all of it to conspiracists, church buildings, and cranks. 

IN THE INITIAL MEETING with staffers, an arts reporter requested Smith if she ought to search for a brand new job. As an alternative of answering, Smith went on an extended rant about how he’s an artist, a “world-class furnishings builder,” and a photographer. However in October, the reply got here, when the Solar disbanded the options desk, the place arts, eating, and human curiosity protection was centered. These reporters weren’t laid off however moved to different desks. Smith has, within the meantime, hung his personal nature images on the newsroom wall, with quotes attributed to Hannah Arendt, Malcolm X, Benjamin Franklin, and others.

“From consulting with a historian and our personal analysis, we discovered some attributed to the fallacious individual, others paraphrased, nonetheless others with punctuation and spelling errors aplenty. And a few had been by no means even uttered by the individual quoted,” the Guild tweeted in a thread displaying these errors. “The Solar regrets the error, however this possession certain doesn’t,” they concluded. 

In response to elimination of the options desk — and to the firing of O’Neill and erosion of Solar requirements — the Guild began a byline strike for election week, wherein reporters would withhold their names from tales they wrote, in protest. And in December, Guild members started handing out flyers accusing Smith of union busting out in entrance of the Solar’s new Harbor East workplace constructing — which additionally homes a number of Atlas eating places that both Smith or his household personal. 

As first reported by the Baltimore Brew, long-time Solar photographer Amy Davis confronted Smith when he arrived exterior of the eating places for dinner. “I’ve plenty of union individuals who work for me everywhere in the nation,” Smith stated. “I’ve no situation with unions.”

Davis requested for a good contract and identified that the workers has not had an across-the-board increase for a dozen years. 

“The purpose is, what have you ever been doing for the final 12 years?” Smith responded. 

“Effectively, we’ve been placing out a rattling good paper, despite the fact that you haven’t been studying it,” Davis stated. She received in another good quips, however when Smith entered the restaurant, there wasn’t a lot else the protesting staffers might do. The week prior, Alex Smith, David’s nephew and the pinnacle of the Atlas Restaurant Group, threatened to name the police on the protesting Guild members. 

In some ways, the very nature of conventional every day journalism that the Solar espouses might make its practitioners much less able to addressing Smith’s populist designs. The “each side” that has so usually characterised fashionable “goal” journalism, may render them much less able to addressing the ideological leanings of their new boss. 

“We’re not political appointees. We’re not speculated to be looking for a brand new job due to a change in administration,” says Condon, the Guild unit rep, who can also be a local weather reporter. “Our battle is importantly not a partisan one. It’s purely a battle for the journalism. And if it had been somebody with the alternative political opinions as David Smith making the identical adjustments, we’d be having the identical dialog.”

And but, it’s unlikely that somebody with the alternative political opinions of Smith would make the identical adjustments: The MAGA motion Smith has allied with is overtly and repeatedly hostile to journalism itself. However, whereas Solar reporters proceed to do good work within the paper, they haven’t been in a position to do far more in protest than withhold bylines and maintain small rallies. Once they introduced the byline strike, a couple of dozen workers members got here out to assist the union. “H.L. Mencken simply puked in his grave,” columnist Dan Rodricks learn aloud from a letter penned by filmmaker John Waters commenting on the disbandment of the options desk. 

“Resistance is futile. You’ll be assimilated,” David Smith stated on the very starting of his January 2024 assembly with Solar staffers, and, for essentially the most half, that’s most likely true. As A.J. Liebling had it, “freedom of the press is assured solely to those that personal one.” 

Activists have, nonetheless, confirmed a bit extra profitable at hampering Smith’s plans to extend management over town. Because the nation was selecting a right-wing populist, Baltimore voters resoundingly rejected Smith and his poll measure. 

“Baltimore isn’t on the market, Baltimore can’t be purchased, our democracy can’t be purchased,” stated Mayor Brandon Scott at a press convention following the election. “Irrespective of what number of stations or newspapers you purchase up.”