How Loudoun County Schools Feuded with TV Station Sinclair at FCC

But the photos Minock included — which show the principal holding an earthworm in an elementary school classroom — were taken two months earlier, a frustrated district spokesperson told the reporter.

“I’m curious,” Dan Adams, the school official, wrote to Minock. “Were you intentionally misleading the community or was this another mistake on your part?”

Adams declined Minock’s follow-up request for an interview. “I cannot in good conscience recommend that Dr. Spence participate in an interview with a journalist who does not adhere to the most basic ethical principles,” he wrote.

It’s not uncommon for government officials to clash with the reporters who cover them. Reporters may have to file Freedom of Information Act requests to get answers from reluctant bureaucrats. Press officers sometimes complain that reporters are biased or demand corrections to stories.

But years of tension between Loudoun County school officials and WJLA-TV took an unusual turn last month, when Adams filed a complaint about Minock with the Federal Communications Commission.

The 36-page letter asks the FCC to investigate WJLA for “distortion of broadcast news,” citing six instances of reporting that Adams called “dishonest and distorted in a manner prejudicial to the public interest.”

The Sinclair Broadcast Group, which operates WJLA and nearly 200 other local TV stations, criticized the complaint as an attempt “to use government power to shut down critical news reporting.” Jessica Bellucci, a spokeswoman for the company, said: “We will not be intimidated by these tactics and we stand by our reporting.”

Adams said the school district has been trying for years to counter what he called a “persistent trend” at WJLA-TV, which, according to his complaint, resulted in what he called multiple inaccuracies in the news stories it aired.

“We tried to build relationships, work with people, and offer corrections where we felt they were necessary and clear and important,” he told The Washington Post. “But with WJLA, it went on. … We just didn’t know what else to do.”

TThe suburban school system, with over 80,000 students, has certainly received more than its fair share of news coverage in recent years.

An affluent Washington, D.C., suburb that has grown nearly fivefold in size over the past 30 years, “Loudoun County has long been a battleground for the culture wars,” said Mark Rozell, a political scientist and dean at George Mason University — and even more so since 2021. A controversy over two sexual assaults by one student at two different schools nearly tore the county apart, and Spence’s predecessor was fired after a grand jury report criticized his handling of the case. The saga played out during the pandemic, when other disputes erupted over mask policies, transgender rights and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

It was a shot in the arm for Republican politicians — including Glenn Youngkin, who made “parental rights” a cornerstone of his winning race for Virginia governor that year — and for conservative politicians media. Fox News ran dozens of segments on “critical race theory” in Loudoun County in 2021, according to an analysis by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters.

Minock is a former political appointee in the Trump administration’s Transportation Department. His reporting has often been picked up by national news organizations that have been highly critical of Loudoun County school officials. But it is his work for WJLA that is the focus of the county schools’ FCC complaint.

In one example Adams cited, Minock aired a story suggesting the school system had cut speech-language pathologist positions and spent $11 million on new bathrooms to accommodate transgender students. But Adams said school officials had previously made it clear to Minock that the system had simply cut a handful of long-vacant positions while keeping a number of speech-language pathologists “above staffing standards.” The bathroom upgrades, meanwhile, were for all students and staff.

In the FCC complaint, Adams called it “a textbook example of WJLA’s efforts to distort information from LCPS to fit an ideological or political narrative.”

Adams also cited a news segment in which Minock reported that school officials stopped the sheriff’s office from using dogs to scan students and their backpacks or cars for drugs. The spokesperson said it was a mutual decision between the schools and the sheriff’s office to limit the searches to public areas, but that WJLA’s story “sounds like LCPS is interfering with the sheriff’s office.”

And Adams cited stories from WJLA that he said wrongly “spread a narrative” that officials failed to notify the community about drug overdoses in schools; the spokesperson noted that one principal sent letters to families to do just that.

In a TV report, Minock said he tried to ask the warden about reports of overdoses, but “Spence walked away.” Adams denied it: The warden gave Minock an interview, he said, but WJLA did not use the footage.

WJLA-TV did not respond to requests for comment and did not make Minock, who recently won three local Emmy Awards, available for an interview.

WJLA’s parent company, Sinclair Broadcast Group, has become known for a decidedly conservative stance in the news programming on its local TV stations. Executive Chairman David Smith has donated generously to right-wing causes, and news reporting on his channels often reflects a Trumpian view that American cities are plagued by violence and decay.

Sinclair has made it a mission, in particular, to report critically on public schools. The national franchise, “Crisis in the Classroom,” amplifies news stories and culture-war skirmishes from across the country: “Connecticut School District Scraps Veterans Day, Columbus Day as Holidays: ‘Gut Punch’”; “Oregon High School Coach Resigns in Protest of ‘Boys Playing Girls’ Sports’: ‘Wrong.’”

The Loudoun County FCC complaint cites the series as an indicator of a distorted narrative: “The name ‘Crisis in the Classroom’ clearly communicates that the stories will be negative in nature.”

This isn’t the first time critics have urged the FCC to investigate Sinclair for bias. After anchors at dozens of the company’s stations across the country aired the same creepy ad decrying “fake news,” 12 U.S. senators asked the FCC to investigate Sinclair for news distortion. (The agency declined.)

In 2007, Sinclair was fined $36,000 after it aired commentator Armstrong Williams’ arguments in favor of the federal No Child Left Behind initiative without disclosing that he had received payments from the Department of Education. A decade later, the FCC fined the network $13.4 million for airing segments during local newscasts promoting a Utah cancer institute without disclosing that they were sponsored by the Huntsman Cancer Foundation. (Sinclair points to arguments from former FCC general counsel that the agency increasingly pursues “unpredictable” and “burdensome” penalties.)

In 2020, when then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced the settlement of that and other large fines against Sinclair, he called it “a cautionary tale” — but said he disagreed with those who had called for the agency to revoke the station licenses.

“Even though they disagree with what they see as the announcers’ positions, the First Amendment still applies here,” Pai said.

WWhether the FCC will respond to Loudoun County’s complaint is an open question.

“There’s very little case law where the FCC has taken a position against news distortion,” said communications attorney Art Belendiuk. “The FCC has set the bar very high for news distortion.”

Belendiuk should know: He himself filed a lawsuit with the FCC a year ago. That lawsuit is an attempt by the Media and Democracy Project to revoke Fox Corp’s license for Fox 29 in Philadelphia. The reason is that Fox News, the crown jewel of its parent company, undermined democracy by knowingly spreading false claims about alleged fraud in the 2020 election.

The FCC can only regulate content that airs on public broadcasting, not cable TV. That’s why the Media and Democracy Project is targeting one of Fox’s local stations instead of the cable news giant. More than 25,000 people signed a petition calling on the FCC to hold a hearing on the complaint.

“The American people own those (broadcast) licenses,” Belendiuk said. “And they require — and the Communications Act requires — that licensees be of a certain character.”

Fox Corp has called the Media and Democracy Project’s filing “frivolous” and “completely without merit.”

Loudoun County’s complaint does not call for the FCC to revoke WJLA’s license or impose any other specific penalty. It calls only for an investigation and “appropriate measures to deter future unethical behavior.”

The FCC said it could not comment on pending cases. But Loudoun’s complaint drew a negative response from a key official.

Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the five-member committee, wrote on X that it was an attempt to “censor a news station for drawing attention to their activities,” and that the FCC should deny the petition.

According to Caitlin Carlson, an associate professor of communications and media at Seattle University, it is highly unlikely that the FCC would take action on such a complaint.

“There are lines between what is legally problematic and what is ethically problematic,” she said. “I think from an ethical (standpoint) there absolutely have to be corrections made.”

But the FCC generally chooses not to comment on claims of “distortion of the news,” saying it cannot act as an “arbiter of truth in journalism.”

“Historically, we’ve said we value press freedom over the type of government or country where we want officials — in this case the FCC — to make judgments about accuracy,” Carlson said.

In rare cases, it has taken action against broadcasters based on their character. In the late 1980s The FCC has revoked licenses for stations in Los Angeles, Boston and New York after their owners were found to have committed financial fraud. Even then, the process took more than 15 years of bureaucratic wrangling and legal challenges.

Still, Adams hopes the complaint, along with other efforts to make accurate information more accessible to the public, will help bring more clarity to reporting on school-related issues.

“We’re going to find other ways to get that good information out to our families,” he said. “Whether it’s a podcast, newsletters, or even more personally going out into the community, that’s what we’re going to do.”