More on the Sinclair flap: FCC Commissioner Michael Copps released a statement on Sinclair's decision to air the Kerry-knocking doc:

This is an abuse of the public trust. And it is proof positive of media consolidation run amok when one owner can use the public airwaves to blanket the country with its political ideology -- whether liberal or conservative. Some will undoubtedly question if this is appropriate stewardship of the public airwaves. This is the same corporation that refused to air Nightline’s reading of our war dead in Iraq. It is the same corporation that short-shrifts local communities and local jobs by distance-casting news and weather from hundreds of miles away. It is a sad fact that the explicit public interest protections we once had to ensure balance continue to be weakened by the Federal Communications Commission while it allows media conglomerates to get even bigger. Sinclair, and the FCC, are taking us down a dangerous road.

The film, written by a former employee of conservative cultist Reverend Sun Myung Moon (who owns UPI and the Washington Times) and airing on stations owned by rightwing partisans and a CEO arrested for soliciting a prostitute, is summarized like this:

In the mid 1960's thousands of young American men left their families, homes and jobs and went to fight for their country in Southeast Asia. Many of them never returned. Others were shot down and captured behind enemy lines. They were forced to suffer years of brutal treatment at the hands of the Communist captors. Their horrifying days of darkness, starvation and torture were made worse by the actions of a young American Officer named John Kerry. As these American heroes suffered, John Kerry sat comfortably in the glow of television lights to tell a Senate Committee that these same men were 'war criminals.'