Corporation for Public Balancecasting
Tavis Smiley attempts to put the debate on Public Broadcasting
- the Corporation for Public Broadcasting specifically, back on even keel
with an OpEd in last Sunday's Washington Post
Left? Right? Wrong! The Misguided CPB Debate.
If anyone thought the restortion of funds in the current budget
settled the matter look for it to heat up again when Cheryl F. Halpern
replaces Kenneth Tomlinson as president of The CPB next year
Major GOP Donor Favored as Next CPB Chairman. Scott Sherman has a usefull current (28 Jul 05) summary of this up :
The Nation | Comment | Press Watch | Scott Sherman. Some points of Mr. Smiley's which I let him make in his own words:
[P]ublic broadcasting has come under renewed attack
by
conservatives who see liberal bias in news and discussion programs on
the Public Broadcasting Service, National Public Radio and Public Radio
International. ...what Tomlinson and critics on Capitol Hill are aiming
for: an ideologically balanced, tit-for-tat, eye-for-eye,
tooth-for-tooth political debate on every public broadcasting
program. ...since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public
Broadcasting Act and Congress chartered the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting; the country has become infinitely more diverse and
multicultural ...why isn't the debate over how public broadcasting can
become more inclusive of folk of different ages and national origins,
of various ethnic groups, faiths and cultures -- over how it can be
used to introduce Americans to new ideas, and to each other?... [to]
foster noncombative, civil conversation, ...intelligent and inclusive
conversation.
Compare this with David Boaz's commentary
Top Ten Reasons to Privatize Public Broadcasting
on the Cato web site. There is a quality the entites that makes up
the CPB have that make them nonfungable with Boaz's legion of imagined
replacements, which even as Boaz imagines them he must know don't
exist. I expect he knows this exactly. He doesn't seem to have the
imagination to see what CPB actually tries to do. What PBS is
doing, is broadcasting. Its approach is still an encompassing appeal to
the entire American audience rather that a deliberate niche marketing
strategy. Broadcasting with narrow-cast numbers. It is this orientation
that makes the CPB an information source that can stand alongside the
small set networks and house organs like Fox news that currently
organize (and reorganize) the national agenda. You see in Boaz's view
the continuing pretense of the right that corporate wealth and
ownership of information outlets is not the same as political power and
never translated into normative adjustment. At his fifth point he
rails against taxpayers money being spent on bias. This implicates his
eighth point, but he sees it as just another marshalled reason for his
titular argument, but at that consider his final point:
1. The separation of news and state. We wouldn't want the
federal government to publish a national newspaper. Why should we have
a government television network and a government radio network? If
anything should be kept separate from government and politics, it's the
news and public affairs programming that Americans watch. When
government brings us the news[~]with all the inevitable bias and spin[~]the
government is putting its thumb on the scales of democracy. It's time
for that to stop.
This article originally appeared on FoxNews.com on July 25, 2005.
Either the right has become masters of a subtle gossemer irony, or they possess none at all.
Frank Rich writing in a column
The Armstrong Williams NewsHour - New York Times
is probably closer to the mark: "The intent is not to kill off PBS and
NPR but to castrate them by quietly annexing their news and public
affairs operations to the larger state propaganda machine that the Bush
White House has been steadily constructing at taxpayers' expense." Critics of the CPB advance their attack on the question of
balance East of the Sun West of the Moon web log noted this point
last month when this issue was being disscussed
Congress' War on Public Broadcasting
"God, there's that pesky question of 'balance' again, being used as a
bludgeon against something good and useful." And I might add to put
weak unsound ideas on the same level as strong ones.
9:58:13 PM ;;
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