A Liberal Boss For Liberal PBSPhil Brennan
The ultra-liberal Public Broadcasting System (PBS) has a new boss, and the head of the tax-funded network is a perfect choice for the left-leaning network – she's a certified member of America's ultra-liberal elite.
Friday, April 27, 2001
Pat Mitchell, PBS head since March of last year, pals around with the likes of global socialist and environmental activist Mikhail Gorbachev, Ted Turner, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford and many other prominent liberals.
Mitchell's leftist credentials are impressive. The new PBS honcho, for example, is a member of the founding board of the Global Green USA organization. Global Green is an affiliate of Gorbachev's globalist environmentalist Green Cross International, which seeks to create an international authority to usurp national sovereignty over the world's natural resources, determine the land use practices of governments and in general impose a socialist order on the world.
The preamble to the Earth Charter, a radical program of Green Cross International backed by Global Green USA, begins with this alarming statement: "The choice is ours: form a global partnership to care for Earth and one another or risk the destruction of ourselves and the diversity of life. Fundamental changes are needed in our values, institutions, and ways of living."
She also sits on the board of trustees of the Sundance Institute and is especially proud of her role in producing one of the most distorted historical documentaries on the Cold War.
As the co-producer of CNN's controversial Cold War series, Mitchell shares the blame for airing a documentary that trumpeted Ted Turner's perverted view of the struggle between the Free World and what Ronald Reagan called the Evil Empire as a conflict in which there was no villain, just a pair of equally contentious rivals.
Tapes of the distorted series were sent to schools all across the nation where schoolchildren are exposed to a false view of one of humanity's most desperate conflicts.
Here is some of what the Washington Times wrote about the series: "From Jacob Heilbrun in the New Republic to Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post to Arnold Beichman in the Washington Times and the Weekly Standard, the series was roundly criticized as an exercise in historical distortion and moral equivalence. ... Before Mr. Turner succeeds in permeating the national psyche with his perspective, it is therefore of the greatest importance that counterbalancing arguments be given due attention.
"Many of these articles can now be found in the best antidote there is to Turnerized world history: the volume, CNN's Cold War Documentary: Issues and Controversy edited by Mr. Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a columnist for this newspaper. (Published by the Hoover Institution Press.)
"It ought to accompany every set of Mr. Turner's 24 tapes that goes into American classrooms," Mr. Beichman writes.
"... I hope that our book will be read by school boards, school principals, teachers, especially high-school teachers, as demonstrating that the Cold War was not merely a struggle between a pair of equally demented gorillas whose snarls and wild swings endangered world peace. In the Cold War, the enemy of freedom was Communism, despite its propaganda claims to be idealism in action, a claim that the Turner-Isaacs documentary and textbook appear at times to accept as valid. ..."
Early in her tenure as head of the 347-station PBS empire, it was revealed that some of the top PBS member stations, which compile huge donor lists, had shared those lists with the Democratic Party, enabling them to tap into a roster of proven givers, many of whom share Mitchell's liberal views.
Those who hoped that PBS might discover the error of their liberal ways have little hope that they'll get their way as long as Mitchell is at the helm.