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Monday, August 1, 2005
 
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.


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2005 Paul Bushmiller.
Last update: 8/4/05; 12:45:22 AM.
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Prolegemma to any future FAQ.

Who are you again?
paul bushmiller
what is it exactly that you do?
at the least, this.
What is this?
it's a weblog.
How long have you been doing it?
3 or 4 years. I used to run it by hand; Radio Userland is more convenient.
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yes
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no
Favorite song?
victoria - the kinks
RockandRoll? Favorite American song then
Omaha - Moby Grape
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Billy in the Lowlands
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any book I can read in a clean well lighted place
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something

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