The Scoop
The owner of Maryland’s biggest paper and TV stations is keeping close tabs on his outlet’s investigation of the state’s governor.
In recent months, The Baltimore Sun has brought on a team of investigators from sister television station Sinclair to comb through Gov. Wes Moore’s records as he seeks reelection and eyes a potential White House run in 2028.
The team, according to records shared with Semafor by Moore’s office, is digging into whether Moore had exaggerated his military record, as well as his high school and collegiate basketball tenure. Beginning in November, the group from the Sun sent a string of letters and emails to Moore’s team with detailed document requests regarding the governor’s service in the Army, the basketball scholarships he’d been offered, and other questions about his youth athletic history and college and fellowship applications.
By February, the team had grown frustrated with what they felt was Moore’s reluctance. So one of the investigators, Drew Sullins, fired off a note to the governor’s communications director, David Turner.
“Governor Moore has said, and continues to say, that he is transparent in all things. The reality is that he has been anything but. He and his team (of which you are a big part) have failed repeatedly to answer the most basic questions about his time in the Army and his deployment to Afghanistan. This is hardly becoming for a public servant occupying the position of high elected office that he does. This lack of transparency suggests — to even the average observer — that he’s afraid of something (or several things) in his military background. In this case, Governor Moore’s silence is actually deafening,” Sullins said.
The Sun’s investigative team was thrilled with the email.
“That’s a hammer!” Sean Lawlor, another investigator working on the Sun project, responded — accidentally including Moore’s team on the reply.
Minutes after the note was sent, several email addresses attempted to “recall” and unsend Lawlor’s email, a feature in some email clients. One of the people trying to recall the email: David Smith, the owner of the paper, who had not been visibly included on the original emails, according to a copy of the request shared with Semafor.
Smith has no official role at the paper, which he acquired in 2024 after its grim decline in the hands of hedge fund owner Alden Global Capital. His name does not appear on the masthead. But Smith, best known as the Trump ally who has steered the Sinclair television affiliate network to the political right, has been the driving force behind the Sun’s transformation from a well-known, fairly old-school, by-the-book regional newspaper to a new, more ideological local media hybrid.
The paper’s new driving force, according to current and former staff who spoke to Semafor, is to expose local and state fraud and the misdeeds — real and perceived — of Democratic politicians who may have had a role in it.
The paper’s rapid changes have not sat well with many on the paper’s staff, some of whom have left for other rival news organizations. They also haven’t gone over well with the Democrats who say the Sun used to cover them more fairly (or favorably).
Smith and the Sun did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Know More
While Smith remains somewhat under the radar in national media circles, many Sun employees and Baltimore residents were already familiar with the local television magnate.
WBFF, the local Sinclair station, remains one of its flagships. Liberals and media critics alike have long grumbled about journalism on the channel, which they said was emblematic of Sinclair’s push of local television media to the right.
At the Sun, following Smith’s acquisition, the newsroom adopted the use of the phrase “illegal immigrants,” abandoning AP style (which discourages it). In another instance the paper’s energy and climate reporter clashed with management over how the paper described climate change, threatening to remove her byline from a story after an editor inserted language pushing back against the assertion that humans had a role in exacerbating global warming, according to two people familiar with the incident.
Sun employees also complained that, as at the local Sinclair station, the paper did not always clearly disclose Smith’s financial backing of candidates or causes. Some have also chafed at the increasing symbiosis between the paper and WBFF.
Some of those changes were cosmetic, like the paper’s website hosting advertisements for an AM radio show by a former Republican congressional candidate and Sinclair host.
Other changes were more meaningful. Sinclair and the paper announced they were launching a joint investigative unit, Spotlight on Maryland, to focus on fraud. Since late 2024, the venture has largely produced stories about allegations of waste in state and local government, and critical coverage of Democratic politicians. But it has also highlighted culture-war issues like state funding for tampons in public bathrooms (including men’s rooms) and bills around gender-neutral language. The paper’s reporters were frustrated that the section featured straight news reporting from a Sinclair commentator who was formerly the vice chair of the state’s Republican Party.
The paper’s reporters tried to push back against the increasing incorporation of Sinclair material into the newsroom. In 2024, several removed their bylines from a story after editors added in reporting from WBFF without the Sun staffers’ knowledge. But it had little impact: Later that fall, the Sun fired a reporter after they complained in a public Slack channel that the paper had published a story from Sinclair on former Democratic prosecutor Marilyn Mosby’s attendance at a BBQ while on home detention. The Sun reporter, Madeleine O’Neill, said the story was old by the time it ran in the paper, and was missing crucial information.
“The story was already several days old on Friday and running this incomplete version threatened my relationship with a source,” O’Neill said, according to Slack messages shared with Semafor. “I can’t do my job if editors are going to undercut me like this.”
“I see almost no difference” between the Sun and the local Sinclair station, another staffer said, “other than the fact that there are some people at the Sun who predate the sale.”
The View From Annapolis
Since Moore’s ascent to the governor’s mansion, he and his staff have been locked in a rhetorical battle with the Sun’s investigative arm over his record.
Since The New York Times revealed in 2024 that Moore had falsely claimed to have received the Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan (the saga is long and winding), Spotlight on Maryland has brought on several military veterans from other parts of the company to investigate, including Sullins, a former reporter-turned-Sinclair IT director, and Lawlor, whose LinkedIn page lists him as Sinclair’s chief corporate security specialist. The team has specifically and methodically combed through Moore’s previous statements point by point to expose any potential lie or exaggeration.
Moore’s team has complained both publicly and privately that the investigation is needlessly hostile and politically motivated. In March, after receiving a 10-question email that focused on the veracity of the governor’s college basketball acceptance, Moore’s spokesperson simply tweeted the questions out.
“What we are seeing in Maryland is part of the same broader story playing out across the country: a smaller and smaller number of ultra-wealthy, right-wing media owners using their platforms to put their fingers on the scale and protect their power while hiding behind the credibility of legacy institutions,” a senior Moore spokesperson told Semafor in a statement. “We should call a spade a spade — this is right wing propaganda wearing the masthead of a formerly trusted news brand. Until proven otherwise, there is no reason to believe that all of Sinclair’s reporting is not done in service of the interests of their billionaire owner.”
Max’s view
Smith’s purchase of the Sun is part of a larger wave of powerful individuals scooping up iconic American news brands and reshaping them ideologically.
Much of this has been relegated to the opinion side. While there is no evidence that Jeff Bezos has interfered with the company’s journalism and reporting since buying the Post, he has changed the output on its opinion side, reshaping it to reflect pro-business, free-market views. Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong similarly changed the makeup of the publication’s opinion side and attempted to reshape its news coverage, which he told Fox News was too far left. David Ellison didn’t buy Paramount to own CBS News, but among his first major orders of business upon acquiring Paramount was buying the anti-woke, pro-Israel digital outlet The Free Press and installing its founder atop CBS’ newsroom.
Smith’s efforts at the Sun go further.
The paper’s new points of focus are legitimate. Coverage of government accountability and fraud in a city with a history of financial abuses is obviously warranted; those topics are considered foundational for most local serious news outlets anywhere.
And the Sun isn’t alone in its scrutiny of Moore’s record, specifically. Mainstream news outlets, including the New York Times and CNN, revealed previous past exaggerations, including the Bronze Star story and Moore’s insinuation that he is from Baltimore when he spent much of his childhood in New York.
Journalism is often abrasive and confrontational. But reading through the comment requests and inquiries sent by the Spotlight on Maryland team to Moore’s office, it was hard not to see that the probe went beyond the normal course of asking questions to reveal new information. The messages were laden with contempt, and at points directly threatened Moore with military disciplinary action.
“Would You Be More Comfortable Answering These Questions As Part Of A Deposition Or In A Court Of Law?” the Spotlight on Maryland reporters emailed to the governor’s communications office at one point, when asking for Moore’s military records.
“Our news team will continue pursuing this matter until they are satisfied that there is either no story - or until further investigation shows that events did not occur as they should have,” the team wrote in one letter to Moore’s office. “If our team finds the latter, they will report that. … We are also prepared to present our findings and concerns to the Secretary of the Army’s office; and if gets to that point, we fully expect it will have become a national level news story requiring the Army Secretary’s attention.”
The tone appears to diverge from the Sun’s own promise to readers: “Our mission is to deliver the truth every day. We bring you the stories that matter most, written without bias, so you can make informed decisions.”
Room for Disagreement
The right-leaning Washington Free Beacon, which has dug in on Moore’s record, has said that the legacy news media is “in cahoots with the aspiring 2028 Democratic presidential cohort.”
Neither Moore’s description of the reporting as a right-wing hit job nor the conservative media portrait of the current coverage is totally accurate: The recent genesis of the questions about Moore’s bio and record were the subject of serious stories several years ago by The New York Times and CNN. Conservative outlets are adding to the story in a manner that is more pointed and relentless, but in another way they’re following reporting broken by the mainstream media.
While Moore’s camp sees the reporting from the Sun and Sinclair as an ideological project intended to blow up his political future before it begins, if he has higher aspirations, ruthless oppositional media will be something he has to tolerate. Ultimately if he decides to run for president, the scrutiny on his record and past statements will be far more intense than some overly rhetorically aggressive and at times bumbling comment requests.
The View From 2028
One Democratic political strategist with no ties to Moore suggested that the intense focus on Moore’s bio now could be helpful to him in a roundabout way. It’s oftentimes preferable to get damaging information about a candidate out early to avoid a negative disclosure derailing a presidential campaign.
Legendarily, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson volunteered in 2005 that he had not, in fact, been drafted to play professional baseball, and more recently, California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote in his book about an embarrassing affair he had with a former staffer who was married to his deputy campaign manager.
Notable
- There seems to be some daylight between Smith and Armstrong Williams, another co-owner of the Sun. Williams has lavished praise on Moore, calling him a “man of honor” in a recent interview.