Sunset in Baltimore – David Smith built a television empire on sensational, crime-saturated newscasts. Then he bought Maryland’s premier newspaper
In January, when the sun first rose on David D. Smith’s ownership of Baltimore’s daily newspaper — a broadsheet that in its swashbuckling heyday boasted a full fleet of foreign correspondents, a muscular Washington bureau, and more than 500 reporters and editors — the shrunken newsroom bristled with anxiety about the new boss.
Smith, a 74-year-old, Baltimore-bred TV mogul with a long history of mixing his politics into his news operations, had promised to leave The Baltimore Sun’s journalism to its journalists. But his record sent a different message: For decades, his Sinclair Broadcast Group’s nearly 200 television stations in Baltimore and 85 other cities — one of the nation’s largest assemblages of local TV outlets — had been known for sensational, crime-saturated newscasts featuring must-run conservative commentaries and investigative stories heavy on critiques of public schools.
At first, it appeared as though the rank and file in The Sun newsroom would be left alone to cover their city: Eleven days after the Key Bridge collapse that paralyzed Baltimore’s vital waterfront in March, The Sun featured nine staff-written stories about the disaster on its homepage, including straight-ahead news stories on President Biden’s visit to Baltimore and features about underwater salvage efforts and people who’d grown fearful of crossing bridges. The news decisions were made by Sun editors on their own, without guidance or directives from the owner.
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