Paul Moore vividly remembers the Baltimore Sun in its heyday, not so long ago.

“More than 400 newsroom staff, six foreign bureaus and a 12-person Washington bureau,” Moore recalled. He was the Sun’s deputy managing editor (and, for a time, its public editor) until 2009. “We were a full-service newspaper, covering the country, the region and the world.” And winning multiple Pulitzer Prizes for the quality of its aggressive, ambitious journalism.

Then came all manner of misfortune – a series of bad owners, the stunning downturn in newspaper economics and – just this week – the paper’s purchase by David D Smith, who runs Sinclair Inc, a Maryland-based media company that made itself infamous a few years ago when it ordered its local journalists in dozens of markets to repeat, word for word, the same rightwing “editorial” about fake news. The identical segments had a hostage-video vibe.

This wasn’t news; it was Trump-inspired propaganda, carried out with all the finesse of a bulldozer blasting into a Waterford crystal factory.

“Everyone I know who cares about the Sun is aghast,” Moore told me by phone this week after the sale became public.

That’s because they all know the answer to the question posed by Joshua Benton........

© The Guardian