PBS Adds Insult to Injury

August 13, 2004 8:49 AM

PBS Adds Insult to Injury Spotted this at Eschaton (Atrios). ..."The far right's decades-long campaign to falsely brand PBS a leftist conspiracy--one that apparently included giving shows to such commies as William F. Buckley, Louis Rukeyser, Ben Wattenberg and Fortune magazine--has really hit pay dirt this year, first in creating a show around CNN's conservative talking head Tucker Carlson, and now, far more egregiously, in creating a program for the extremist editorial board of the Wall Street Journal...."
posted by Postroad (6 comments total)

For some reason I couldn't finish reading this.
posted by swift at 9:01 AM on August 13, 2004

There are a lot of magazines, each with many articles. Many of these are posted on the internet super duper highway. What is the criteria for those that are posted here? Best of the web? I don't think so.
posted by Outlawyr at 9:12 AM on August 13, 2004

Bollocks. Two word rebuttal: Bill Moyers. Has Alterman forgotten him? And don't get me started on Frontline.
posted by mojohand at 9:24 AM on August 13, 2004

Two word rebuttal to your two word rebuttal: So what?

And please do get started on Frontline. Are you going to make the case that Frontline is a "liberal" (defined by conservatives as "not sufficiently right wing") organ in the same way that the Wall Street Journal editorial page is a blatant, lying, wingnut propaganda device?

Bwa-ha...bwahahaha...
posted by Reverend Mykeru at 9:30 AM on August 13, 2004

But perhaps what is most offensive about PBS's decision to fund and broadcast Carlson (who already has a show on CNN five evenings a week) and the Journal editors (whose preaching is subsidized and distributed by the Dow Jones Corporation, whose profit last year topped $1.5 billion) is that it is being portrayed by its sponsor, New York's WETA, as "balance" for the program Now With Bill Moyers. In fact, these conservative opinion programs are in no way comparable to Moyers's show. Though Moyers is unarguably a liberal, his show is not a program of ideological advocacy but of public journalistic investigation. Its primary function is to air reports of corporate and governmental abuses that appear nowhere else in the media, and to explore all sides of contentious issues. When Moyers does an interview, you are just as likely to get a Robert Bartley, a Grover Norquist or a Paul Gigot as anyone on the liberal side of the aisle. When Moyers retires at the end of the year (at which time PBS will reduce the show to a half-hour), his chosen replacement will be David Brancaccio, a reporter who comes from that hotbed of anticapitalist agitation, NPR's Marketplace.

If you're going to trash the article, do us the courtesy of reading it first, mojohand.
posted by Epenthesis at 9:31 AM on August 13, 2004

What is the criteria for those that are posted here?

I think a good test is that it shouldn't be an article that will *evar* show up on google news, and it should provide interesting views or information without simply fanning the flames.

I find the ongoing battle for the body and soul of PBS and public broadcasting in general a fascinating one. It's a little less heated than many such battles, but I think it reflects many of the concerns found in issues where reasoned discussion is rendered impossible. What role *should* government have as a content provider? How *do* you measure the 'slant' of a network? How *can* an entity like NPR or PBS respond to criticism from the extremes on either side without destroying what makes it good?

While I find the accusations of liberal bias overplayed, I suspect that some of what makes me enjoy NPR so much is that it does seem 'comfortable' and 'smart' to me. While I think a lot of this is just that it is (mostly) well presented, when I apply those adjectives to a news source I must be suspicious there's some underlying slant. However, given all the recent disclosures of commercial media's prostration bfore the administration, this like it might be an entirely appropriate counterweighting. And accusations of bias in anything more substantial than 'tone' and 'sympathy' seem preposterous to me.
posted by freebird at 9:37 AM on August 13, 2004