The Baltimore Sun’s letters-to-the-editor column last week featured a vigorous defense of the newspaper’s monthslong investigation of Maryland governor Wes Moore’s military service. The letter blasted a critic, saying he “offered indignation and diversion while totally avoiding the evidence at the center of the investigation,” and noted that the Sun failed to tell its readers that he has a role in Moore’s administration. The author of the August 6 “reader commentary,” however, wasn’t just another steamed Sun subscriber: It was Drew Sullins, who happens to be the lead analyst and principal writer of the Moore stories. In effect, the Sun permitted Sullins to act as judge, jury, and executioner of his own work.

Sullins’s letter was unusual, if not unprecedented. “In my near half-century at the Sun, staff reporters and freelancers were not allowed to respond to letters to the editor with a published rebuttal,” said Dan Rodricks, who resigned from the paper last year. “It’s just something we had to accept, though many of us had the urge to respond. It was the editors’ way of saying: ‘You had your say, now let the reader weigh in.’”

To Moore’s camp, the letter illustrated the lengths the venerable newspaper and an allied consortium of media partners has gone to smear the Democratic governor, who is expected to handily win reelection in November and seen as a serious 2028 presidential contender. The intent, they suggest, is to take down Moore before he even decides upon seeking higher office. Moore — and some former Sun journalists — say the animus toward the governor is driven by the paper’s principal owner, David D. Smith, a wealthy conservative who bought a majority stake in the newspaper in 2024. Smith is also the executive chairman and one of the controlling shareholders of Sinclair, Inc., the Baltimore-area broadcasting giant.

In addition to the Sun, which Smith personally owns, the Moore stories have been prominently featured on Sinclair’s Baltimore and Washington TV stations. Sinclair, in turn, has fed the stories to its chain of stations across the country, turning Moore into a news story in places like Columbus, Ohio, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. “We are watching right-wing billionaires buy up newsrooms across the country and use those institutions to advance political agendas, Ammar Moussa, Moore’s spokesman, told me. “If the owner of the Baltimore Sun is directly involving himself in newsroom operations or coverage decisions about the Governor, that is extraordinary, disturbing, and deeply corrosive to public trust,” she added. “Marylanders deserve strong local journalism. They do not deserve a newspaper being used as a political weapon by its owner.”

Moore has accused the Sun of “slander and misinformation” and has suggested that Smith is directly shaping the coverage. Moore’s office released emails from Smith’s reporters indicating that he had been copied on the journalists’ queries. Moore even suggested in a June MS NOW interview that Smith had ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted sex offender, a claim that prompted Smith to sue Moore for defamation last month. (Smith denies having had a personal or business relationship with Epstein.) In the same interview, Moore asserted that Smith said that “the job of the Sun is to do Donald Trump’s work,” which Smith denies. (According to The Guardian, Smith told Trump in 2016 that Sinclair could help “deliver” his message.)

The bad blood stems from the withering news, “analysis,” and commentary pieces — 19 published since April — in which the Sun and Sinclair have questioned Moore’s claims about his service as an Army officer in Afghanistan 20 years ago. The stories have explicitly and repeatedly suggested that Moore lied about his military exploits, particularly his........

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