Posted on 05/10/2005 4:23:57 AM PDT by Libloather
Under the Hammer-May 5, 2005
By John Hammer
This news is so shocking that it made the front page of The New York Times. The Public Broadcasting System has a liberal bias. It’s hard to believe, but according to the new Republican chairman of the board of the Public Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio and Television have a decidedly liberal point of view.
It has shocked the employees at the national broadcasting system that a Republican would accuse them of not being nice to Republicans. According to a rumor, one senior producer even said he had invited a Republican over for dinner one night and he didn’t care what his neighbors said.
Anyone with conservative leanings knows that the Public Broadcasting System operates as an arm of the Democratic Party – or that might be unfair, because NPR is far to the left of many Democrats. The organization has a socialist bent and it is a pleasant surprise that someone with some authority is noticing.
I think the socialists should have a radio and television network. I just think they should have to pay for it and I resent the fact that I am forced under threat of forfeiture of my property and imprisonment to pay for it. If liberals were forced to pay for Rush Limbaugh they would be up in arms, but I really don’t think that Limbaugh is any further to the right than NPR is to the left. Look at its political analyst Daniel Shore, a man who was fired from the mainstream networks for being too liberal. Too liberal for decidedly liberal networks – that’s a liberal’s liberal. Shore may occasionally admit that some Republicans are not ogres, but it doesn’t happen very often.
The dastardly new chairman of PBS, Kenneth Tomlinson, actually had an independent study done of the political guests invited on the Bill Moyers show. The network employees found underhanded maneuvering like independent studies really unfair. If the new chairman wanted to know whether or not PBS was liberal, he should have asked the PBS employees who could have told him that was all just right-wing hogwash and then they could have gone back to canonizing Bill and Hillary Clinton.
What is even worse for the rank and file PBS employees is that Tomlinson hired a Republican and a former member of the Republican National Committee to be the new president of the corporation.
You had better believe that when the folks at national public broadcasting heard there was going to be a Republican running the show, the line formed at the copy machine copying resumes.
However, if PBS is what the liberals claim it is, which is unbiased, why should it be a problem for a Republican to be president? Shoot, it shouldn’t even be a problem if they had Republican producers and writers. But according to The New York Times, the idea of Republicans at PBS is such big news it belongs on the front page.
You can’t have it both ways. If The New York Times and other liberal institutions really believe that PBS is unbiased and has no political leanings, then it should certainly not be news to have Republicans working there – unless The New York Times, PBS and other liberal institutions believe that only liberals can be unbiased and that conservatives are biased. That works in the offices of The New York Times, PBS and other liberal institutions, but you can’t take that show on the road and not expect to get hit with rotten vegetables because the vast majority of the US is made up of red states.
Here is more bad news for PBS and for The New York Times: They are behind the times. Politics in the US today is dominated by Republicans. The people didn’t just elect a Republican president. The voters elected a Republican majority in the House and Senate as well. Before this presidency is over, Bush is likely going to have a couple of Supreme Court appointments and that will cover all three branches of government.
It is absurd for the people of this nation who have made their political leanings known at the ballot box to fund a public broadcasting system that broadcasts the press releases of the Democratic Party as if they are fact.
Just look at The New York Times. Would it have been news if a Democrat had been named president of the Public Broadcasting System? It doesn’t seem likely and that in itself indicates a problem.
Its time to put a fork in it...
Will somebody inform the Senators about this? Seems like they're the last to know.
I heard Schorr a couple of weeks ago when I was traveling and had the car radio set to a PBS station to listen to classical music. He was being "interviewed" by some PBS Babe as an expert on the character of John Bolton. It was just sickening.
Rush never pretends that he is a newsman. While the comparison to Schorr as taxpayer subsidized is interesting, it must be remembered that it is not quite accurate.
ML/NJ
Also a majority of Governors, State Senates and State Houses.
We thought we elected Rock-Ribbed-Republicans, but instead we got Sponge Bob Squarepants............
From the link above -
On NPR last week, they had a discussion of the new law in Florida that makes it legal to fight back if someone attacks you. Most people didn’t know it was illegal to fight back if someone attacks you, but evidently in many states, including Florida, if you were attacked and had the opportunity to run away, it was illegal to use force.
The NPR announcer was shocked that such a radical law could pass anywhere in this civilized country and he expressed his disbelief. He asked a reporter in Florida how a law like this could pass by overwhelming majorities in the state legislature. The answer was the powerful lobby of the National Rifle Association. Neither even mentioned the possibility that this law was passed by the state legislature because the overwhelming majority of the people in Florida believed that if a law-abiding citizen were attacked, they had the right to defend themselves by whatever means necessary.
There is a burden of proof which should be undertaken whenever politicians use the word "society" or the word "public." Presumptively those words are mere euphemisms for government. If the speaker or writer means nothing other than government, then s/he should be required to use the word which explicitly says what s/he means.PBS stands for "Public" Broadcasting System. Does it mean anything other than Government Broadcasting System? IMHO it does not. I am not proposing that PBS is controlled by George Bush - but I do assert that Mr. Bush does not control the whole of the government. And that all journalism which claims to be objective does so by the acquiescence of an Establishment which is unified around the go-along-and-get-along principle that questioning the objectivity of one member is questioning the objectivity of all.
There is no distinct boundary between the "objective journalism" Establishment and the Democratic Party, as the example of George Stephanopolis illustrates. Not only PBS but all broadcast journalism which is known as such (as opposed the journalism which Rush Limbaugh et. al. perform under the rubric of "talk radio") exists in symbiosis with print journalism - all agree to be known collectively as "the press" and to exclude others from that appellation.
The claim of objectivity is a claim of wisdom - and a claim of wisdom is arrogant sophistry which rejects the principle that it has need to continue to listen to facts and logic with which it does not wish to agree.
Must read later.
"Would it have been news if a Democrat had been named president of the Public Broadcasting System?"
NYT: "Democrat In Charge Of PBS" = "Dog Barks At Postman"
NYT: "Republican In Charge Of PBS" = "Dog Reads Scripture To Postman"
Really? I didn't know that.....;-)
It's also worth noting that the percentages of government support for CPB/NPR/PBS are invariably understated, because of the way support is divvied up and hidden in various ways. There are direct grants to stations for operations, grants for production of the content, etc. So if, say, PBS says "well, we only get X% of our funding from government", this tends to ignore the fact that PBS broadcasters also get government grant money to air (Leftist) content generated with government grant money.
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