Sinclair and social responsibility

When Sinclair Broadcasting decided to preempt programming to air the anti-Kerry film, Stolen Honor, a decision that sacrificed profits to present a program Sinclair's managers thought the public ought to see, I remarked

People wonder, can the shareholders sue the board. . . . [W]hy should they want to? After all, the managers are just being socially responsible. Isn't that what the shareholders want?

Apparently not. Sinclair has backed down in response to threatened litigation, notably including a possible suit by the notorious Bill Lerach, who said:

At a time when the company is experiencing troubles, the board and officers should be focused on creating shareholder value -- not pressing [a] controversial personal political agenda at shareholders' expense.

So, apparently the law says that managers must maximize shareholder value, and that managers who question this maxim will be challenged in court. In other words, lawyers are the new front line in corporate irresponsibility.

This could not be politically motivated, of course. Though Lerach, like much of the rest of the trial bar, is a Democrat, he insists in the article just quoted that "[w]e are equal-opportunity suers."

Or maybe this is somehow different from corporate social responsibility, as a commenter to my initial post suggested:

I think there is a real distinction here. Asking a corporation to act in a socially-responsible manner to limit its OWN negative externalities is one thing; taking sides in an independent political battle is something else. It is not that I necessarily mind the company taking sides -- Fox News does, The New York Times does -- but my difficulty is seeing how this falls under the rubric of corporate social responsibility.

But the press's freedom to "take sides" is a big part of what it's long viewed as its special responsibility. Thus, today's WSJ appropriately compares Sinclair's actions to the WaPo in Watergate. How can we forget Jason Robards, Jr. as Ben Bradlee in All the President's Men describing his paper's mission:

Nothing's riding on this except the first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country.

Well, apparently in the future, at least in Bill Lerach's view (who is, after all, an "equal opportunity suer") firms are going to have to stick closer to their knitting. Perhaps this will include keeping those sweatshops running full blast, clearcutting those forests, stopping those free drugs to the poor, or whatever constitutes "social responsibility" for the firm involved.

Unless this attack on Sinclair is not a matter of principle, but purely a partisan slam. But I won't even contemplate that possibility.