Save PBS from Right-Wing!

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Dissident
I'm going to have to call you out Oerdin.

If PBS truelly is independant, why are the republicans so intent on cutting funding?

Simple, ideology. The Republicans hate the ideo of there being a public corporation who's goal is to serve the public interests in a nonprofit manner. They want their friends in the corporate media to control every media outlet in the country while PBS and NPR offer a valuable alternative which not only flies in the face of their ideology but it also proves their dogma about government programs always being a failure and/or inefficient.

PBS/NPR often dig deeper and spend more time going indepth on a subject then the brief sound bits commercial media give because they don't have to pander as much to share holders or corporate interests. Also PBS/NPR will go after stories which the corporate media ignore because they're afraid of scaring advertisers. In short PBS performs a valuable public service and the corporate media spends millions lobbying to kill it while Republican ideology also demands that this independent voice be silenced.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Kidicious
PBS sucks. It shouldn't recieve federal funding. They would be better off sucking up to Corporate America.

Mostly they do. This is where the GOP could really screw PBS, but taking away their not for profit status, so that donations are no longer tax deductable.

[chequita guevara]

Oerdin, also remember that PBS and NPR take up "valuable" airwaves that could be used for profit.

Although coming from Mr neo-liberal, your arguments are kinda inconsistent.

[JimmyCracksCorn]

Originally posted by DanS
Here's tonight's lineup for my public TV channel...

Newshour (non-partisan)
NOVA (non-partisan)
Clear the Skies (non-partisan)
Frontline (sometimes center-right, sometimes center-left)
Charlie Rose (left, but tolerable)
Tavis Smiley (left)
Nightly Business Report (non-partisan)
In the Life (far-left)

Realize that this schedule makes it tough to support the station, whether through the congress or through private donations.

Seeing that PBS, and public media in general, is constantly under attack by right wing and republican groups... is it really any surprise that they might veer slightly to the left?

In fact I'd say its amazing it isn't more left wing.

[Dis]

PBS is incredibly boring anyways. You can find better news on the internet.

the only show worth a damn is Nova.

[Impaler[WrG]]

I agree a lot of their programs can be boring but the good ones more then make up for it, the News Hour is the crow-jewel of PBS. It is by far and away the best news program in this nation.

I wish PBS has the same kind of status (read untouchable) that the BBC has (even after some resent tarnishing) has in England. This kind of think would never even be considered their.

[Ramo]

Incidentally, Bill Moyers gave an excellent speech on publicv broadcasting recently:

http://www.freepress.net/conference/

Some of the highlights:

I was na’ve, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. But that’s what Kenneth Tomlinson has done.

On Fox News this week he denied that he’s carrying out a White House mandate or that he’s ever had any conversations with any Bush administration official about PBS. But the New York Times reported that he enlisted Karl Rove to help kill a proposal that would have put on the CPB board people with experience in local radio and television. The Times also reported that “on the recommendation of administration officials” Tomlinson hired a White House flack (I know the genre) named Mary Catherine Andrews as a senior CPB staff member. While she was still reporting to Karl Rove at the White House, Andrews set up CPB’s new ombudsman’s office and had a hand in hiring the two people who will fill it, one of whom once worked for … you guessed it … Kenneth Tomlinson.

I would like to give Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t. According to a book written about the Reader’s Digest when he was its Editor-in-Chief, he surrounded himself with other right-wingers — a pattern he’s now following at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

There is Ms. Andrews from the White House. For acting president, he hired Ken Ferree from the FCC, who was Michael Powell’s enforcer when Powell was deciding how to go about allowing the big media companies to get even bigger. According to a forthcoming book, one of Ferree’s jobs was to engage in tactics designed to dismiss any serious objection to media monopolies. And, according to Eric Alterman, Ferree was even more contemptuous than Michael Powell of public participation in the process of determining media ownership. Alterman identifies Ferree as the FCC staffer who decided to issue a “protective order” designed to keep secret the market research on which the Republican majority on the commission based their vote to permit greater media consolidation.

It’s not likely that with guys like this running the CPB some public television producer is going to say, “Hey, let’s do something on how big media is affecting democracy.”

Call it preventive capitulation.

As everyone knows, Mr. Tomlinson also put up a considerable sum of money, reportedly over $5 million, for a new weekly broadcast featuring Paul Gigot and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Gigot is a smart journalist, a sharp editor, and a fine fellow. I had him on NOW several times and even proposed that he become a regular contributor. The conversation of democracy — remember? All stripes.

But I confess to some puzzlement that the Wall Street Journal, which in the past editorialized to cut PBS off the public tap, is now being subsidized by American taxpayers although its parent company, Dow Jones, had revenues in just the first quarter of this year of $400 million. I thought public television was supposed to be an alternative to commercial media, not a funder of it.

But in this weird deal, you get a glimpse of the kind of programming Mr. Tomlinson apparently seems to prefer. Alone of the big major newspapers, the Wall Street Journal has no op-ed page where different opinions can compete with its right-wing editorials. The Journal’s PBS broadcast is just as homogenous –- right- wingers talking to each other. Why not $5 million to put the editors of The Nation on PBS? Or Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! You balance right-wing talk with left-wing talk.

There’s more. Only two weeks ago did we learn that Mr. Tomlinson had spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That’s right. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson spent $10,000 of your money to hire a guy to watch NOW to find out who my guests were and what my stories were. Ten thousand dollars.

Gee, Ken, for $2.50 a week, you could pick up a copy of TV Guide on the newsstand. A subscription is even cheaper, and I would have sent you a coupon that can save you up to 62 percent.

For that matter, Ken, all you had to do was watch the show yourself. You could have made it easier with a double Jim Beam, your favorite. Or you could have gone online where the listings are posted. Hell, you could have called me — collect — and I would have told you.

Ten thousand dollars. That would have bought five tables at Thursday night’s “Conservative Salute for Tom DeLay.” Better yet, that ten grand would pay for the books in an elementary school classroom or an upgrade of its computer lab.

But having sent that cash, what did he find? Only Mr. Tomlinson knows. He’s apparently decided not to share the results with his staff, or his board or leak it to Robert Novak. The public paid for it — but Ken Tomlinson acts as if he owns it.

In a May 10 op-ed piece, in Reverend Moon’s conservative Washington Times, Tomlinson maintained he had not released the findings because public broadcasting is such a delicate institution that he did not want to “damage public broadcasting’s image with controversy.” Where I come from in Texas, we shovel that kind of stuff every day.

As we learned only this week, that’s not the only news Mr. Tomlinson tried to keep to himself. As reported by Jeff Chester’s Center for Digital Democracy (of which I am a supporter), there were two public opinion surveys commissioned by CPB but not released to the media — not even to PBS and NPR. According to a source who talked to Salon.com, “The first results were too good and [Tomlinson] didn’t believe them. After the Iraq War, the board commissioned another round of polling, and they thought they’d get worse results.”

But they didn’t. The data revealed that, in reality, public broadcasting has an 80 percent favorable rating and that “the majority of the U.S. adult population does not believe that the news and information programming on public broadcasting is biased.” In fact, more than half believed PBS provided more in-depth and trustworthy news and information than the networks and 55 percent said PBS was “fair and balanced.”

Tomlinson is the man, by the way, who was running The Voice of America back in 1984 when a partisan named Charlie Wick was politicizing the United States Information Agency of which Voice of America was a part. It turned out there was a blacklist of people who had been removed from the list of prominent Americans sent abroad to lecture on behalf of America and the USIA. What’s more, it was discovered that evidence as to how those people were chosen to be on the blacklist, more than 700 documents had been shredded. Among those on the blacklists of journalists, writers, scholars and politicians were dangerous left-wing subversives like Walter Cronkite, James Baldwin, Gary Hart, Ralph Nader, Ben Bradlee, Coretta Scott King and David Brinkley.

The person who took the fall for the blacklist was another right-winger. He resigned. Shortly thereafter, so did Kenneth Tomlinson, who had been one of the people in the agency with the authority to see the lists of potential speakers and allowed to strike people’s names. Let me be clear about this: There is no record, apparently, of what Ken Tomlinson did. We don’t know whether he supported or protested the blacklisting of so many American liberals. Or what he thinks of it now.

But I had hoped Bill O’Reilly would have asked him about it when he appeared on The O’Reilly Factor this week. He didn’t. Instead, Tomlinson went on attacking me with O’Reilly egging him on, and he went on denying he was carrying out a partisan mandate despite published reports to the contrary. The only time you could be sure he was telling the truth was at the end of the broadcast when he said to O’Reilly, “We love your show.”

We love your show.

I wrote Kenneth Tomlinson on Friday and asked him to sit down with me for one hour on PBS and talk about all this. I suggested that he choose the moderator and the guidelines.

There is one other thing in particular I would like to ask him about. In his op-ed essay this week in Washington Times, Ken Tomlinson tells of a phone call from an old friend complaining about my bias. Wrote Mr. Tomlinson: “The friend explained that the foundation he heads made a six-figure contribution to his local television station for digital conversion. But he declared there would be no more contributions until something was done about the network’s bias.”

Apparently that’s Kenneth Tomlinson’s method of governance. Money talks and buys the influence it wants.

Read/listen/watch to it all. It's awesome.

[DanS]

You must realize what an own goal that quoting Moyers is.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Oerdin


Simple, ideology. The Republicans hate the ideo of there being a public corporation who's goal is to serve the public interests in a nonprofit manner. They want their friends in the corporate media to control every media outlet in the country while PBS and NPR offer a valuable alternative which not only flies in the face of their ideology but it also proves their dogma about government programs always being a failure and/or inefficient.

PBS/NPR often dig deeper and spend more time going indepth on a subject then the brief sound bits commercial media give because they don't have to pander as much to share holders or corporate interests. Also PBS/NPR will go after stories which the corporate media ignore because they're afraid of scaring advertisers. In short PBS performs a valuable public service and the corporate media spends millions lobbying to kill it while Republican ideology also demands that this independent voice be silenced.

It would be easier to edit this to: "The Republicans hate the idea of the public interest".

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Ramo

There’s more. Only two weeks ago did we learn that Mr. Tomlinson had spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That’s right. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson spent $10,000 of your money to hire a guy to watch NOW to find out who my guests were and what my stories were. Ten thousand dollars.

How do I get a job like that?

[Ramo]

You must realize what an own goal that quoting Moyers is.

You realize that the argument is not about whether Bill Moyers is strongly liberal, right? Just as Tucker Carlson, Nightly Business Report, Wallstreet Journal, McLaughlin Group, etc. are all conservative.

[DanS]

NBR and McLaughlin are conservative?

You're totally stretching here.

I haven't watched the WSJ report.

[MrFun]

Some Republicans really have to compensate for their small ****s in some way, don't they?

[Ramo]

NBR and McLaughlin are conservative?

You're totally stretching here.

To be fair, I don't watch NBR very much so I might have a slanted view of it. But yes, certainly McLaughlin. Hell, the group has Pat Buchanan. There's a difference between reasonable conservatives (such as those who write for the Economist), and insane wingnuts.

I haven't watched the WSJ report.

You read the op-eds right? It's the same way.

[chequita guevara]

The sad things is that America has become so reactionary that Goldwater would be a liberal to some of these folks.