But the photos Minock attached — showing the superintendent handling an earthworm in an elementary school classroom — had been taken two months earlier, as a frustrated district spokesman informed the journalist.
“I’m curious,” Dan Adams, the schools official, wrote to Minock. “Were you purposefully misleading the community or was this another oversight on your part?”
Adams denied Minock’s follow-up request for an interview. “I cannot in good conscience recommend Dr. Spence participate in an interview with a journalist who does not adhere to the most basic ethical principles,” he wrote.
It’s not unusual 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 secretaries sometimes complain that reporters are biased or demand corrections to stories.
But years of tensions between Loudoun County schools 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 “broadcast news distortion,” citing six instances of reporting that Adams called “dishonest and distorted in a way that injures the public interest.”
The Sinclair Broadcast Group, operator of WJLA and nearly 200 other local TV stations, blasted the complaint as an attempt “to leverage government power to shut down critical news coverage.” Said Jessica Bellucci, a spokeswoman for the company, “We will not be intimidated by these tactics, and we stand by our reporting.”
Adams said the school district has tried for years to push back against what he called a “persistent slant” at WJLA-TV, resulting in what his complaint describes as multiple inaccuracies in the news stories it puts on the air.
“We tried building relationships, working with folks, and offering corrections where we felt they were necessary and obvious and important,” he told The Washington Post. “But with WJLA, it continued. … We just didn’t know what else to do.”
The suburban school system of 80,000-plus students has certainly made more than its share of news in recent years.
An affluent Washington, D.C., suburb that nearly quintupled in size over the past 30 years, “Loudoun County has long been a culture-wars battleground,” said Mark Rozell, a political scientist and dean at George Mason University — and even more so since 2021. A controversy over a pair of sexual assaults committed 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 matter. The saga unfolded during the pandemic, when other disputes erupted over masking policies, transgender rights, and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
It was red meat for Republican politicians — including Glenn Youngkin, who made “parental rights” a keystone of his winning race for Virginia governor that year — and for conservative media. Fox News did dozens of segments in 2021 about “critical race theory” in Loudoun County, according to an analysis by liberal watchdog group Media Matters.
Minock is a former political appointee in the Trump administration’s Transportation Department. His reporting has frequently been picked up by national news outlets that have been highly critical of Loudoun County school officials. But it’s his work for WJLA that is the focus of the county schools’ FCC complaint.
In one example cited by Adams, Minock aired a story suggesting that the school system had cut speech pathologist jobs while spending $11 million on new bathrooms to accommodate transgender students. But Adams said that school officials had previously made it clear to Minock that the system simply eliminated a handful of long-vacant slots while maintaining a number of speech pathologists “above the staffing standard.” The bathroom upgrades, meanwhile, were for all students and staff.
In the FCC complaint, Adams called it “a prime example of WJLA’s efforts to twist information from LCPS to fit an ideological or political narrative.”
Adams also cited a news segment in which Minock reported that school officials were preventing the sheriff’s office from using canine units to scan students and their backpacks or cars for drugs. The spokesman said that it was a mutual decision between the schools and sheriff to limit searches to public areas — but that WJLA’s story “sounds as if LCPS is obstructing” the sheriff’s office.
And Adams cited WJLA stories that he claims falsely “drive a narrative” that officials failed to let the community know about drug overdoses in the schools; the spokesman noted that a principal sent letters to families doing just that.
In one TV report, Minock said that he attempted to ask the superintendent about overdose notifications, but that “Spence walked away.” Adams denied it: The superintendent gave an interview to Minock, he said, but WJLA didn’t use the footage.
WJLA-TV did not respond to requests for comment or 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 distinctly conservative stance underlying the news programming on its local TV stations. Executive chairman David Smith has donated generously to right-wing causes, and news coverage on his channels often reflects a Trumpian viewpoint that American cities are violence-plagued and crumbling.
In particular, Sinclair has made a mission of reporting critically on public schools. Its national franchise, Crisis in the Classroom, amplifies news stories and culture-war skirmishes from around the country: “Connecticut school district removes 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 slant: “The name Crisis in the Classroom clearly communicates that the stories are going to be negative in nature.”
It’s not the first time critics have urged the FCC to examine Sinclair for bias. After anchor teams at scores of the company’s stations across the country delivered the same eerie promo 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’s arguments in favor of the federal No Child Left Behind initiative, without divulging that he had taken payments from the Education Department. A decade later, the FCC fined the broadcaster $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 by former FCC general counsels that the agency has increasingly pursued “unpredictable” and “burdensome” penalties.)
In 2020, when then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced the settlement of that and other large penalties against Sinclair, he called it a “cautionary tale” — but said he disagreed with those who called on the agency to revoke its station licenses.
“While they don’t like what they perceive to be the broadcaster’s viewpoints, the First Amendment still applies around here,” Pai said.
Whether the FCC will respond to the Loudoun County complaint is an open question.
“There is very little case law where the FCC has taken a position against news distortion,” said communications law attorney Art Belendiuk. “The FCC has set a very high bar for news distortion.”
Belendiuk would know: He has his own year-old claim pending before the FCC, representing an effort by the Media and Democracy Project to revoke Fox Corp.’s license for its Fox 29 in Philadelphia, on the grounds that the parent company’s crown jewel, Fox News, undermined democracy by knowingly airing false claims about supposed fraud in the 2020 election.
The FCC can only regulate the content that goes out over public broadcast airwaves, not cable television — which is 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 demand — and the Communications Act requires — that licensees be of a certain character.”
Fox Corp. has called Media and Democracy Project’s filing “frivolous” and “completely without merit.”
The Loudoun County complaint does not call for the FCC to revoke WJLA’s license or for any other specific penalty — just an investigation and “appropriate action to dissuade future unethical behavior.”
The FCC said it could not comment on pending cases. But the Loudoun complaint drew a negative reaction from one key official.
Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the five-member commission, wrote on X that it was an attempt to “censor a news station for shining a light on their activities” and said that the FCC should dismiss the filing.
It’s highly unlikely that the FCC would take action on such a complaint, said Caitlin Carlson, an associate professor of communications and media at Seattle University.
“There are lines between what is legally problematic versus what is ethically problematic,” she said. “I think, from an ethical [standpoint], absolutely, there are corrections that should be made.”
But the FCC typically chooses to avoid weighing in on “news distortion” claims, saying that it should not act as an “arbiter of truth in journalism.”
“Historically, we have said we value press freedom over being the kind of government or country where we want officials — in this case, from the FCC — making judgments about accuracy,” Carlson said.
In rare cases, it has taken action against broadcasters on the basis of their character. In the 1980s, the FCC revoked licenses for stations in Los Angeles, Boston and New York after it was revealed that their owner had committed financial fraud. Even then, the process took about 15 years of bureaucratic wrangling and court appeals.
Nevertheless, Adams is hoping that the complaint, along with other efforts to make accurate information more available to the public, will help clarify 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, even getting out more in person in the community, that’s what we’re going to do.”
