How Loudoun County schools took a spat with Sinclair TV station to FCC

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…