…you may live in Ohio. Last night, in place of ABC World News and Nightline, at least one Ohio ABC affiliate broadcast an “election special” that looked like a news program, but was actually a partisan critique of the Obama administration. It was even hosted by the station’s news anchors. Talking Points Memo has the story:

TPM has learned that WSYX and at least one other station operated by the Sinclair Broadcast Group in the crucial swing state last night aired election specials, which included content prepared by their corporate parent company. Some TPM readers may recall Sinclair has a history with this kind of thing. In the run up to the 2004 election, controversy erupted over the company’s plan to air a movie attacking then-Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s Vietnam record. Sinclair “owns and operates, programs or provides sales services to 74 television stations in 45 markets,” according to the company’s website.

The half-hour program that aired on WSYX, obtained by TPM, was billed on the station’s website as “ABC 6 Election Speical – VOTE 2012.” But at times, it sounded more like Fox News than local news.

As part of the lead-up to Frontline’s new documentary, The Choice 2012, they’ve asked several close observers and biographers of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to engage in what amounts to an online version of a roundtable discussion about the two men and the formative experiences of their lives.

I found it to be a fascinating exchange.  Take, for example, this entry from Obama biographer David Maraniss responding to an earlier observation by Jodi Kantor:

That’s right, Jodi, and it goes back even a decade before that speech, even before he became a community organizer in Chicago. In 1982 he wrote a letter to a girlfriend in which he described how his life was forcing him to an all-embracing philosophy. “Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me,” he wrote. “The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions and all the classes; make them mine, mine theirs.”

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Spoken word artist Taylor Mali’s poem, “I’ll Fight You For The Library” is a battle-in-four-letters between a veteran teacher and an administrator over whether the school’s library will be available for the teacher’s students to conduct research for an assignment…or whether it will be used for a “Facilities Utilization” committee meeting.

It came to mind when I saw this (brutal, devastating) ad from the Obama campaign about Mitt Romney’s business career and personal finances.

For those who can’t watch the video, it takes as its “soundtrack” Romney singing a verse of “America the Beautiful” during a January campaign stop at a retirement community in Florida.  This was a regular feature of Romney’s campaign appearances earlier this year, and he’d often connect the lyrics to the state in which he was speaking—”amber waves of grain” for Iowa and Missouri, “purple mountain majesties” for New Hampshire and Colorado, etc.

In doing so, Romney was not only displaying his patriotic bona fides, he was also implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) making the case that many Republicans and conservatives have made against Barack Obama:  that he doesn’t really love America, and that he’s not really, fully American.  Often this is tied to rhetoric about “taking back” or “restoring” our country, with the implication that the current occupant of the White House somehow doesn’t legitimately belong there.

The Obama campaign ad marries Romney’s unaccompanied singing of “America the Beautiful” with a plain series of statements (and accompanying images):

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