Free Republic

Paul Duke, whose storytelling skills and journalistic evenhandedness set the tone for the venerable public television show "Washington Week in Review," has died of leukemia, his former employer WETA-TV said Tuesday. He was 78. Duke died Monday at his home. He was already a political news veteran — having worked for The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal and NBC — in 1974 when he began his two-decade stint as the show's moderator. Now called "Washington Week," the Friday night program featuring journalists discussing the week's news is the Public Broadcasting Service's longest running news program. In a recent essay...

It's time to take the public out of the Public Broadcasting Service. That is, it's time to cut taxpayer-funded broadcasting loose and let it compete.... Conservatives have long charged PBS with liberal programming bias. Now liberals are claiming that congressional Republicans are trying to influence programming and personnel. Those charges got louder with the naming Thursday of former GOP co-chair Pat Harrison as president and chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.... This came after 16 Senate Democrats — including New York's Chuck Schumer and both Jon Corzine and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey — called for the dismissal...

In a move seen as a Republican attack on public broadcasting and its "liberal bias,” a GOP-controlled House subcommittee has voted to cut federal funding for public television and radio nearly in half. The move would eliminate a $23 million federal program that helps underwrite popular children’s shows such as "Sesame Street” and "Postcards From Buster.” Also, the subcommittee voted to eliminate within two years all federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides a portion of public broadcasters’ funds, beginning with a 25 percent cut in CPB’s budget for next year – from $400 million to $300...

A House subcommittee voted yesterday to sharply reduce the federal government's financial support for public broadcasting, including eliminating taxpayer funds that help underwrite such popular children's educational programs as "Sesame Street," "Reading Rainbow," "Arthur" and "Postcards From Buster." In addition, the subcommittee acted to eliminate within two years all federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- which passes federal funds to public broadcasters -- starting with a 25 percent reduction in CPB's budget for next year, from $400 million to $300 million. In all, the cuts would represent the most drastic cutback of public broadcasting since Congress created...

When I think about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, I can't help but think of Pravda, the official newspaper and mouthpiece of the Communist Party back in the days of the Soviet Union. Now, don't get me wrong. It really isn't any of the similarities in their ideological bent that connects them in my mind. Rather, it is the concept underlying both, the idea that the government ought to be in the news business, the documentary business, or even the entertainment business. When government is involved in producing or subsidizing news coverage or political and historical documentaries — even entertainment...

The leaning tower of PBS *Liberals see a conservative bent and vice versa. Meanwhile, station officials are getting nervous. By Matea Gold, Times Staff Writer SAN FRANCISCO — Public television officials are increasingly fearful that PBS is reemerging as a political football after a series of efforts by Republicans to promote more conservative perspectives on the taxpayer-supported network. Station managers and programmers gathered here for two public broadcasting conferences last week expressed growing alarm about recent actions by officials of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the private nonprofit agency charged with distributing federal funds to public broadcasters. Kenneth Tomlinson, the...

GOP-dominated oversight agency says it's seeking balance on the air WASHINGTON - Liberal commentator Bill Moyers has exited his PBS show. Buster the animated rabbit is under a cloud of suspicion. And right-wing yakkers from the Wall Street Journal editorial page have been handed their own public television chat show. Some observers, including people inside the Public Broadcasting Service, are troubled by these recent developments. PBS, they say, is being forced to toe a more conservative line in its programming by the Republican-dominated agency that provides about $30 million in federal funds to the Alexandria, Va.-based service. Officials at the...

POCATELLO - National Public Radio's award-winning talk show host, Terry Gross, took a break from interviewing political leaders and cultural icons for a speaking tour, including a stop-off at Idaho State University Wednesday. Some conservatives have tagged NPR as one of the cornerstones of the "liberal media," but Gross said that isn't completely true. The word liberal has two connotations, she said, politically left and liberal, as in the liberal arts. In the first political sense of the word, Gross said NPR has no agenda and presents unbiased, balanced coverage of national and world events. "Some people in this day...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. In the Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne broadcast an opera over the prison loudspeaker system and was punished with 30 days in the hole, a veritable tomb of solitude. When the month was up, his fellow inmates asked how he had made it through. It was the memory of the works of his favorite composers, he replied, which kept him sane. I like music almost as much as Tim Robbins' character, but unfortunately do not possess his cognitive prowess. And so, when the tape deck in my car went comatose a couple...

NEGATIVE NUMBERS AT CHANNEL 9 (Seattle PPS) (This may be boring if you don't live in Seattle but, if you live in the area, it's pretty funny)Seattle's fiscally challenged public-television station has a new investor: an offshore bank.BY NINA SHAPIROIn February, Jim Green, a financial wheeler-dealer in Vancouver's video industry, completed a deal that put $3 million into the bank account of KCTS-TV. The desperately needed money is funding a significant share of the shows in the pipeline at Seattle's public-television station. Never entirely explained to the staff or announced to the public, the investment has been the subject...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 - With a newly robust endowment burning holes in its not-for-profit pockets, National Public Radio is in the midst of a major expansion. But NPR's ambition has stirred anxiety within the public radio system over how to preserve the character and financial viability of local stations in the ever larger shadow of the national production service they created more than 30 years ago as a modest support operation. NPR, a member organization governed in part by local stations, is pumping $15 million into its news division over the next three years, using interest from a recent bequest...

A media watchdog organization believes it is time for the U.S. Congress to re-evaluate the necessity of allocating 86 million taxpayer dollars to National Public Radio (NPR) in light of the tremendous private funding it receives. Recently, National Public Radio announced that it plans a $15 million expansion of its news operation. NPR is funding the expansion with just a fraction of the 200 million-dollar bequest the network received last fall from the late widow of McDonald's magnate Ray Kroc. Seeing how the public radio network appears to be living high on the hog, Tim Graham of the Media Research...

(CNSNews.com) - National Public Radio has decided to use a philanthropist's generous donation for a "major expansion" of its news operation. NPR announced on Tuesday that it would spend $15 million over the next three years on additional reporters, editors, producers and managers; as well as new domestic and international bureaus. The 2004-2007 expansion will be funded in part by interest from the $225 million in bequests that NPR received from the late philanthropist Joan Kroc, the widow of the man who founded McDonald's. Joan Kroc died in October 2003. NPR has described her bequest as "the largest monetary gift...

IF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BLACKSMITHS AND BUGGYWHIP MANUFACTURERS had held a convention in 1910, in those last sullen moments before the Horseless Carriage put them all out of business, then this is what it must have felt like--the same forced cheerfulness laid over the same defeated air, the same stiff upper lip at the prospect of the inescapable end. Outside the Hilton Clearwater Beach Resort, on the Florida coast near Tampa Bay, the beach was streaked with wind and black thunderheads stacked up along the horizon. Inside the hotel, members of the Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio...

When National Public Radio was launched in 1971, it promised to be an alternative to commercial media that would “promote personal growth rather than corporate gain” and “speak with many voices, many dialects.” In 1993, when FAIR published a study of NPR’s guestlist that challenged the network’s alternative credentials (Extra!, 5/93), incoming NPR president Delano Lewis was still boasting about being a place where the unheard get heard (The Humanist, 9/93): “Our job is to be a public radio station. So therefore the alternative points of view, the various viewpoints, should be aired.” Today, current NPR president Kevin Klose insists...

NEW YORK - National Public Radio has bounced Bob Edwards, host of Morning Edition since its inception in 1979, out of his job. The radio network announced Tuesday that Edwards, 56, will become senior correspondent of NPR News at the end of April, with his reports being heard on various broadcasts. Edwards said he was disappointed by the move, particularly that he won't be the host when the program celebrates its 25th anniversary in November. "You have to figure it's going to happen someday and you get out before they do it," he said. "But I failed." Edwards said he...

LOL...James Randi, the magician and debunker of paranormal hoaxes, observes on his website that ...(Currently, my local PBS-TV stations are featuring both Dr. Wayne Dyer and Dr. Gary Null in their pledging period, to take advantage of the public's taste for quackery. Both these men flaunt degrees, both deal in nonsense. Dyer makes incredibly naïve statements such as that if you just summon up enough determination, "anything is possible," and Null prescribes magnets and other medieval tools to prevent aging. He preaches eternal youth. Now, Null is less than 60 years old, but I recognize dyed hair and make-up, and...

<p>Is Fox News Channel "fair and balanced," as its motto claims?</p> <p>Or is that slogan a clever marketing line designed to hide Fox News political tilt to the right?</p> <p>And with its success — by far, it's the No. 1-rated cable news channel — have journalists failed to challenge Fox News on its boast?</p>

Talk radio: It's time for more than right-wing hot air Why should we settle for just RIGHT-WING HOT AIR? 02/01/04GARRETT EPPS I t was a match worthy of World Wrestling Entertainment. In this corner, one mild-mannered, wordy academic; in the other, Kevin Mannix's minister of information, the pistol-packing Godzilla of Portland talk radio, Lars Larson. It was the fall of 2001. I was a visiting professor at Duke University. A Portland radio show wanted someone to explain the new policy of trying foreign terrorists in front of military commissions. I boned up on the topic and called in at the...

&#8216;We're in trouble; and he means public TVMoyers' program an issue with McCain, Hollings warnsOriginally published in Current, Jan. 19, 2004By Karen EverhartSouth Carolina Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings warned pubcasters that the upcoming Senate reauthorization of the Public Broadcasting Act will be a tough fight. "We&#8217;re in trouble," said Hollings, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee. During a Jan. 11 [2004] luncheon at the National Educational Telecommunications Association Conference in New Orleans, Hollings suggested that public TV will take hits for the PBS series Now with Bill Moyers. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) views Moyers,...