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PBS panders to right with new programming
Sept. 17— A new public television program
called The Journal Editorial Report, featuring writers and editors from
the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page, debuted Sept.
17on public television stations around the country. The show joins Tucker
Carlson: Unfiltered, hosted by conservative CNN pundit Tucker Carlson,
and a planned program featuring conservative commentator Michael Medved
as part of what many see as politically motivated decisions to bring
more right-wing voices to public television.
According to reports in the public broadcasting newspaper Current (1/19/04,
6/7/04) and in the New Yorker (6/7/04), conservative complaints about
the alleged liberal bias of the program Now with Bill Moyers contributed
to the momentum to “balance” the PBS lineup. The new programs
seem to be the result of that pressure. In fact, Now will soon see its
role on public television diminish, as the program is cut from one hour
to 30 minutes when Moyers voluntarily leaves the program later this
year. If Carlson, Medved and the staff of the Wall Street Journal editorial
page are all necessary to balance the liberal Moyers, by 2005 there
will be no one on PBS to balance them.
At the center of this controversy is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
(CPB), which provides significant federal funding for public broadcasting
projects. Two Bush appointees to the board last year, Cheryl Halpern
and Gay Hart Gaines, are big donors to the Republican Party, and do
not hide their political agenda. As Common Cause noted in December 2003,
Gaines raised money for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga), and
chaired his political action committee, GOPAC.
According to Ken Auletta’s investigation in the New Yorker, the
calls for drafting right-wing voices were being heard at PBS. Auletta
reported that PBS president Pat Mitchell met with Lynne Cheney and conservative
television producer Michael Pack to discuss a possible PBS series about
Cheney’s children’s books. Though the project seemed to stall,
Pack was soon appointed senior vice-president for television programming
at the CPB.
Auletta also reported that after Gingrich told Mitchell that there weren’t
enough conservatives on PBS, Mitchell “proposed to Gingrich that
he co-host a PBS town-hall program,” an idea that was frustrated
by Gingrich’s contract with Fox News Channel.
The notion that public broadcasting should find ways to balance itself
is odd, and accepts at face value the right-wing critique that PBS is
biased to the left. If anything, PBS (and public broadcasting in general)
is theoretically designed to balance the voices that dominate the commercial
media. As the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act proposed, public broadcasting
should have “instructional, educational and cultural purposes”
and should address “the needs of unserved and underserved audiences,
particularly children and minorities.”
Instead, public television has in practice largely been a home for elite
viewpoints, dominated by long-running political shows hosted by conservatives
(Firing Line, McLaughlin Group, One on One) and by business shows aimed
at the investing class (Nightly Business Report, Adam Smith’s Money
World, Wall $treet Week). When this line-up wasn’t enough to insulate
public TV from right-wing complaints in the mid-1990s, programmers responded
by creating more series for conservatives like Peggy Noonan (Peggy Noonan
on Values) and Ben Wattenberg (Think Tank).
Now PBS seems once again to be trying to placate right-wing critics,
in this case by bringing to public broadcasting voices already well-represented
in the mainstream media. Tucker Carlson’s take on world affairs,
for example, is available at least five days a week on CNN; it’s
not clear that he would say anything different on PBS, though in a test
show (L.A. Times, 6/18/04) he referred to the Democratic convention’s
diversity goals as “a new affirmative action plan for gays, lesbians
and cross-dressers,” and called Indian evangelist Dr. K.A. Paul
a “spiritual advisor to the scum of the Earth.”
PBS president Mitchell defended the recent programming decisions, telling
a meeting of TV reporters (Miami Herald, 7/10/04): “I suppose that
we’re being accused on the one side of being too liberal and on
the other of being too conservative probably means we’re getting
it mostly right.”
Given that PBS is responding to conservative complaints by adding more
conservative shows, and is not responding in any substantive way to
progressive complaints, one can only conclude that if the network had
been “getting it mostly right,” it’ll now just be getting
mostly right-wing.
CPB was initially intended to be a “heat shield” for public
broadcasting, protecting programmers from political pressures from partisan
lawmakers who control the purse strings. It’s long since become
a mechanism for transmitting Congress’ ideological desires to public
broadcasting, and the new shows announced for public TV show that it’s
very effective in that role.
Source: FAIR
The lynching of Dan Rather
By Greg Palast
“It’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest
of the tough questions,” the aging American journalist told the
British television audience.
In June 2002, Dan Rather looked old, defeated, making a confession he
dare not speak on American TV about the deadly censorship — and
self-censorship — which had seized US newsrooms. After September
11, news on the US tube was bound and gagged. Any reporter who stepped
out of line, he said, would be professionally lynched as un-American.
“It’s an obscene comparison,” he said, “but there
was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around
people’s necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that
you will be necklaced here. You will have a flaming tire of lack of
patriotism put around your neck.” No US reporter who values his
neck or career will “bore in on the tough questions.”
Dan said all these things to a British audience. However, back in the
US, he smothered his conscience and told his TV audience: “George
Bush is the President. He makes the decisions. He wants me to line up,
just tell me where.”
During the war in Vietnam, Dan’s predecessor at CBS, Walter Cronkite,
asked some pretty hard questions about Nixon’s handling of the
war in Vietnam. Today, our sons and daughters are dying in Bush wars.
But, unlike Cronkite, Dan could not, would not, question George Bush,
Top Gun Fighter Pilot, Our Maximum Beloved Leader in the war on terror.
On the British broadcast, without his network minders snooping, you
could see Rather seething and deeply unhappy with himself for playing
the game.
“What is going on,” he said, “I’m sorry to say,
is a belief that the public doesn’t need to know — limiting
access, limiting information to cover the backsides of those who are
in charge of the war. It’s extremely dangerous and cannot and should
not be accepted, and I’m sorry to say that up to and including
this moment of this interview, that overwhelmingly it has been accepted
by the American people. And the current Administration revels in that,
they relish and take refuge in that.”
Rather’s words had a poignant personal ring for me. He was speaking
on Newsnight, BBC’s nightly current affairs program, which broadcasts
my own reports. I do not report for BBC by choice. The truth is, if
I want to put a hard, investigative report about the US on the nightly
news, I have to broadcast it in exile, from London. For Americans my
broadcasts are stopped at an electronic Berlin wall.
Indeed, Dan is in hot water for a report my own investigative team put
in Britain’s Guardian papers and on BBC TV years ago. Way back
in 1999, I wrote that former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes had put in
the fix for little George Bush to get out of ‘Nam and into the
Air Guard.
What is hot news this month in the US is a five-year-old story to the
rest of the world. And you still wouldn’t see it in the US except
that Dan Rather, with a 60 Minutes producer, finally got fed up and
ready to step out of line. And, as Dan predicted, he stuck out his neck
and got it chopped off.
Is Rather’s report accurate? Is George W. Bush a war hero or a
privileged little Shirker-in-Chief? Today I saw a goofy two page spread
in the Washington Post about a typewriter used to write a memo with
no significance to the draft-dodge story. What I haven’t read about
in my own country’s media is about two crucial documents supporting
the BBC/CBS story. The first is Barnes’ signed and sworn affidavit
to a Texas Court, from 1999, in which he testifies to the Air Guard
fix — which Texas Governor George W. Bush, given the opportunity,
declined to challenge.
And there is a second document, from the files of US Justice Department,
again confirming the story of the fix to keep George’s white bottom
out of Vietnam. That document, shown last year in the BBC television
documentary, “Bush Family Fortunes,” correctly identifies
Barnes as the bag man even before his 1999 confession.
At BBC, we also obtained a statement from the man who made the call
to the Air Guard general on behalf of Bush at Barnes’ request.
Want to see the document? I’ve posted it at: www.gregpalast.com/ulf/documents/draftdodgeblanked.jpg.
This is not a story about Dan Rather. The white millionaire celebrity
can defend himself without my help. This is really a story about fear,
the fear that stops other reporters in the US from following the evidence
about this Administration to where it leads. American news guys and
news gals, practicing their smiles, adjusting their hairspray levels,
bleaching their teeth and performing all the other activities that are
at the heart of US TV journalism, will look to the treatment of Dan
Rather and say, “Not me, babe.” No questions will be asked,
as Dan predicted, lest they risk necklacing and their careers as news
actors burnt to death.
Source: Commondreams.org
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