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On Monday, Jeff Barker, who spent twenty-five years as a reporter at the Baltimore Sun, posted on X that he was resigning. “I was proud to have been there during a long period when our reporting followed the facts wherever they happened to lead,” he wrote. “I’m not saying anything readers can’t see for themselves, but The Sun has changed since its purchase by David Smith, executive chairman of the Sinclair Broadcast Group. I no longer fit there.”

It was a stark rebuke of the Sun and of its owner, Smith, a wealthy conservative who once told Donald Trump: “We are here to deliver your message. Period.” As the chairman of Sinclair, Smith oversees the largest local TV network in the United States, a media operation known for its right-wing slant that includes more than a hundred and seventy-five stations in seventy-nine markets. In 2024, Smith purchased the Sun personally. 

“I’m not a whistleblower with inside information,” Barker told me when I reached out to learn more about his departure. “But what I see—what alarms me—are some published politics stories that seem to be guided by preconceived notions. It feels like you can predict the outcome without reading the article. I don’t know if this can be called ‘agenda journalism,’ but I think the best stories are unpredictable because you don’t know where the facts will take you.”

A key example has been the Sun’s coverage of Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland. Moore, who is a potential 2028 presidential contender, has accused the Sun and Smith of waging a campaign to damage his reputation and call his integrity into question. Since April, the Sun has published an extraordinary set of articles looking into Moore’s military record and personal story. 

The topic is certainly worthy, and Moore’s service has been examined by other news outlets. In 2024, the New York Times uncovered that he had wrongly claimed on an application that he had been awarded a Bronze Star and failed to correct the record during his first gubernatorial run, in 2022. Moore has said his claim was an “honest mistake” and blamed it on a clerical error. After his former commander resubmitted the paperwork for the award, he received the Bronze Star later that year. 

But there are a number of unusual things about the Sun’s coverage. The reporting is being produced via a consortium, Spotlight on Maryland, that unites the Sun with two Sinclair stations, Fox 45 and WJLA, despite the fact that the Sun is owned by Smith independently. The team operates entirely outside of the Sun’s newsroom and, according to current and former Sun reporters, does not submit to the same editorial processes. 

And there is evidence that Smith is directly involved in the reporting. In February, he attempted to recall an embarrassing message sent by a Sinclair employee to Moore’s team, indicating that Smith had been bcc’d on a set of questions sent by the lead reporter, Drew Sullins. (The incident was first reported by Max Tani for Semafor.) More broadly, journalists who work at the Sun have told me that Smith appears to maintain an unusually close relationship with the newsroom, regularly attending editors’ meetings and speaking daily by phone with an editor. Tricia Bishop, the managing editor of the Sun, did not respond to questions about Smith’s editorial involvement. 

Perhaps most unusual is the involvement of Sullins, who is also the general manager of one of Sinclair’s technology subsidiaries. His previous experience as a journalist was a three-year stint at Fox 45 in the nineties. In an article explaining his role, Sullins writes that he was asked by news leadership to review Moore’s military records because of his thirty-plus-year career in the Army, and that he has “stayed with it.” When I reached out to Sullins, and asked whether Smith was directly involved in the Moore investigations, Sullins wrote to me: “I am not going to comment on internal Baltimore Sun editorial processes.” He added: “My work on Governor Moore’s military record is ongoing, and I am not going to discuss an open investigation before that work is complete.” He also said that he is an independent and that his personal political views have not affected his reporting. Neither Candy Woodall, who oversees the Spotlight on Maryland team, nor a Sinclair spokesperson responded to requests for comment. 

It’s not clear to me why Sullins would be tasked with this reporting assignment rather than tapped as a source. His limited journalism background comes across in some of his communications with Moore’s team, according to emails shared with me by the governor’s office (some of which Semafor has reported on). “It’s clear to anyone with even a modicum of common sense that Governor Moore has a problem with telling lies that grossly exaggerate his record of accomplishment and boost his public image,” one message went. In another, he wrote: “Based on everything I know to date, one could fairly characterize Moore’s deployment to Afghanistan as a ‘ticket-punching’ endeavor designed to build his résumé for a future political career, and that isn’t a flattering description.” 

“It’s totally legitimate to look at the governor’s biography. His self-presentation. I think these things are often telling in terms of candor and honesty,” David Folkenflik—NPR’s media correspondent, who previously spent a decade at the Sun—told me. “The complicating factor here is that they’ve stripped away a lot of the layers of experience and expertise, and you’re having a tendentiousness that pervades it.” The coverage “feels like it’s basically drawing conclusions, and it’s using, at times, fairly loaded terms, instead of letting the facts speak for themselves,” he said. “It’s accusatory without being conclusive.”

In recent weeks, Moore has addressed the concerns raised about his military service. He gave an extensive interview to the Baltimore Banner, to which he provided military records that had not been public. The Banner concluded that Moore was a “competent, well-respected soldier” who at times “mischaracterized or inaccurately recounted details” in his storytelling. “Governor Moore has been clear that he welcomes tough, fair, legitimate journalism. That is not what is at issue here,” Ammar Moussa, a spokesperson for Moore, told me, of the Sun coverage. “What is unusual here is the pattern: a newspaper owned by a right-wing billionaire, whose media company has a long history of injecting political agendas into local news, repeatedly pushing coverage that appears designed to diminish the governor’s service rather than inform the public.” On Tuesday, Moore, who is running for reelection, won his primary race with more than 85 percent of the vote.

“Wes Moore does have a difficult relationship with the truth, and he has not been honest about key elements of his biography,” Madeleine O’Neill, a former Sun reporter who was fired for raising concerns about the editorial direction of the newsroom, told me. “However, the people doing this reporting for the Baltimore Sun are not real journalists—and by that, I don’t mean they don’t have the qualifications. I mean they don’t have the appropriate frame of mind for asking these questions.” 

Folkenflik, who knows Barker, views him “as straight-ahead, as fair-minded, as easygoing a guy as you could hope to ask for, just an admirable person and journalist. And for him to say this, he wasn’t a guy who got up on a soapbox a whole lot,” he said. “I take that really seriously.”

On June 14, police in Senatobia, Mississippi, were called to a local Walmart over a suspected shoplifting incident involving a package of diapers. Within hours, an officer had shot and killed a one-year-old named Kohen Kartier Wiley. He had been sitting on his mother’s lap in the passenger seat of a car that was driving away from the scene.

Vellesiya Wiley, the boy’s mother, was physically unharmed. The driver of the car was critically wounded. In an official statement, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation claimed that “the driver of the car drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one,” and described the one-year-old as “a juvenile child fleeing from the store into a vehicle.” 

Much of what we actually know about Wiley’s shooting, and why the public has any understanding of what happened beyond the police narrative, is the result of local reporting from outlets such as Action News 5 and the Mississippi Free Press, which have scrutinized and challenged the initial version of events. Action News 5—in Memphis, Tennessee, about forty miles north of Senatobia—has led the coverage, consistently breaking news. After authorities refused to identify the officers involved, the station obtained five years of officer-involved-shooting records from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which revealed an officer’s name.

Ashton Pittman, the news editor of the Mississippi Free Press, told me the newsroom’s goal has been to provide context and a clear accounting of what happened without simply reproducing the police framing or relying on the passive constructions that can blur accountability. He believes the story has sparked local protest and captured national attention because the circumstances are so difficult to reconcile. “I want to be clear that we do not know that there was actually any shoplifting here. The mother has said that she believes her friend paid at the self-checkout,” he said. “But a lot of people are really incensed, specifically, over the idea that this is over just a pack of diapers. I think that has struck a nerve for a lot of people who understand how expensive it is to raise children, who understand that not everyone is able to afford these basic goods.”

For many community members, Kohen Wiley’s death is the latest chapter in a series of troubling encounters with police. “There’s definitely been simmering racial tensions in that area of the state,” Pittman said. “This is a small town of maybe eight thousand people. And the Senatobia Police Department has made national news several times in recent years.” At a press conference on Monday, Benjamin Crump, a prominent civil rights attorney, demanded that law enforcement immediately release any video capturing the shooting. The Mississippi Department of Public Safety has said that it will not release any footage until its investigation is over, which could take six to nine months. Kohen’s family announced that his funeral will be held tomorrow.

If you’ve spent any time scrolling through social media, you’ve likely encountered some alternative-medicine and “wellness” influencer content pushing miracle cures and incredible patient stories. The wellness industry, worth billions, now has a powerful ally in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, who has said he has tried many of the treatments, including stem cells, peptides, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and chelation. 

In an impressive seven-part investigation from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Carrie Teegardin, Danny Robbins, and Phoebe Quinton examine the dangerous realities of alternative medicine, exploring how Georgia “has emerged as a safe harbor for risky medicine that often leaves patients with drained savings, empty-handed for answers and, in some cases, even physically harmed by providers operating outside the law and the standard of care.”

For the reports, the team scoured public records and online information to look at hundreds of alternative-medicine and wellness businesses in Georgia and researched the qualifications of nearly three hundred practitioners. They also reviewed eight years of public records to better understand the Georgia medical board’s oversight, ultimately concluding that the board is “one of the nation’s weakest.”

They found “an anything-goes atmosphere” that has made Georgia a destination for patients from across the country seeking treatments that are largely regulated elsewhere. Providers across Georgia are offering treatments that “run counter to accepted science, mainstream medicine and federal guidelines” with impunity, including injections or IV infusions of hydrogen peroxide, compounded vitamins, peptides or stem cells, or breathing in high concentrations of oxygen. 

The reporters also interviewed a number of patients who described negative and, in some cases, devastating experiences with these procedures. Doris Tyler was suffering from macular degeneration, a progressive eye disease, when she sought an almost nine-thousand-dollar stem cell treatment from a clinic in suburban Atlanta that claimed that patients who had tried the protocol had seen improvements in their vision. Within months, Tyler suffered a retinal detachment in both of her eyes, leaving her blind. She later learned the doctor who treated her had limited training and that the organization that trained her provider was aware that there was a risk of retinal detachment two months before she received the treatment. Tyler and her husband, Don, sued the clinic and eventually reached a settlement.

“Sometimes I feel so stupid that we trusted them, but I did,” Tyler told the Journal-Constitution. “I grew up, and I think Don did too, believing that if you went to the doctor, that he had your best interest at heart and that he knew or she knew what they were talking about.”

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