The politicization of Baltimore’s Inspector General 

By Dayvon Love

The purpose of an inspector general (IG) is to provide a mechanism for the public to have the information it needs about what is happening within the government to hold political leaders accountable. This can be an important tool for protecting the interests of our community. But no tool is immune to abuse. David Smith, the majority owner of the Baltimore Sun and the executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcasting has a track record of using these kinds of tools and using his money and influence to politicize these tools. 

In 2022 he invested thousands of dollars on a ballot initiative to impose term limits on local elected officials. While this seems like a harmless and for some a positive development for local politics, David Smith’s interest was not based on what is best for our community. This ballot initiative was a way to undercut the power of Black elected officials that he projects as inherently corrupt. 

In 2024 Smith pursued the use of this tool again by investing thousands of dollars on a ballot question that would have reduced the size of the Baltimore city council nearly in half. The stated rationale is that this would make government more efficient by having less council members. This logic is asinine because less council people means there are less people in position to assist residents with navigating city government. What I am clear about is that a smaller city council would allow wealthy people like him more ease to buy off members of the city council. Fortunately, LBS and many other organizations fought to educate voters in order to defeat this ballot question. 

Smith is not an innocent civic minded person that wants transparent and effective government, he has a political agenda. An explicitly right wing agenda that is based in racism. In fact in 2018 David Smith was quoted as saying about Sinclair Broadcasting that “we are to deliver your message” to president Trump.

Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates has been a hand maiden of David Smith’s political agenda on a variety of issues. The most recent criticisms of MONSE (Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement) by Bates is consistent with Fox45’s propaganda to discourage public investments in Black led grassroots organizations and instead make more investments in law enforcement. Bates is publicly a major advocate of the practice of automatically charging youth as adults, where the youth who are in the adult system (80 percent of them Black) are typically subjected to over 100 days in the adult prison system where they don’t have access to school or any services. He is supportive of this practice in spite of the fact that 80 percent of the youth who begin in the adult prison system either have their charges dropped or are waived back down to the juvenile justice system anyway. Sinclair Broadcasting through its station Fox45 has been active in putting out propaganda to stop the work of changing this practice.

Smith has also used his influence and power to provide a platform and support to Baltimore’s Inspector General, Isabel Cumming, in order to use her access to government documents to support Sinclair’s propaganda war against the Scott Administration. There is no news outlet that covers the IG more than Sinclair, and this is not a coincidence. Smith is using his influence to abuse the tool that an IG provides to the public in order to advance his political agenda. What has been frustrating is that in the coverage of the back and forth between the Mayor and the IG there has been no serious acknowledgment of the clear political agenda that is backing the position of the IG. In other words, if the political agenda of David Smith does not enter the conversation at all when covering this issue, it is not a serious conversation. What is even more frustrating is that there is not an institutional effort by the Maryland Democratic Party, nor by leaders of the party to develop an international political strategy to counter the impact of David Smith’s right wing propaganda.

The political purpose of Smith platforming the IG is to provide ammunition that a person like Ivan Bates may use in a run for Mayor in 2028. The frivolous stories about procurement cards, the Mayor’s SUV and the dispute with the IG are election material to use against him to support someone like Bates who is a willing collaborator with Smith right wing agenda. 

Even though I am a revolutionary Black nationalist that has strong criticisms of the Democratic Party, I feel a sense of second hand embarrassment watching Democrat leaders be politically tepid in pushing back against a right wing media mogul who has said that he wants to carry Trump’s message. It’s frustrating and embarrassing to watch Democratic Party elected officials do nothing to attack David Smith and his media empire, while claiming to be fighting against the facism of the Trump administration. It is this kind of political cowardice  that makes it hard for rank and file members of the Black community to take Democrats seriously.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the AFRO.

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