Turning PBS into Pravda

Conservatives have their panties in a twist over Oscar the Grouch's membership in MoveOn and Henrietta Pussycat's "No Blood for Oil" bumper sticker. They are, of course, determined to stifle any and all news and legitimate political debate, so Bush to the rescue! He's installing his minions into positions of power over at the closest thing we have to an actual news outlet in the United States.

Before you chastise me with, "Oh, Michael, Pravda? Isn't that a little extreme?" Read on:

Last year CPB [Corporation for Public Broadcasting] handpicked two new conservative-leaning programs to balance out the alleged liberal bias on PBS: "Tucker Carlson Unfiltered," hosted by the conservative pundit, and "The Journal Editorial Report," featuring the uniformly pro-Bush editors from the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. The two shows became perhaps the first in CPB history to be greenlighted specifically because they had an overt political perspective. That kind of micromanaging of the program schedule ought to be off-limits, says former board member Carpenter: "The board should not get involved in individual programming decisions. That's outside its purview."

Without the knowledge of his board, Tomlinson last year contracted with an outside consultant -- at a cost of $10,000 -- to monitor the weekly PBS news program "Now With Bill Moyers" for liberal bias, according to a report in the New York Times. [Ed. - and they're suggesting possible fines for any "liberal bias," however the CPB decides to define that term.]

Late last year CPB suggested that PBS's long-established journalism standards were inadequate and urged it to alter the wording of its "objectivity and balance" guidelines. [Ed. - like how Kansas wants to redefine science.]

In March, Tomlinson hired a White House staffer to help draft guidelines for the new positions of PBS ombudsmen, who would specifically monitor bias in programming.

Last month, without informing PBS first, CPB appointed the ombudsmen. One of the men last year publicly endorsed a Republican for governor in Indiana, and the other, a self-described conservative, is a close friend of Tomlinson's.

CPB shocked the public broadcasting community on April 8 by refusing to renew the contract of its chief executive officer, Kathleen Cox. She was replaced with Ken Ferree, a Republican who was a top advisor to Michael Powell, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and who helped Powell craft new rules that would have drastically loosened media-ownership rules.

Finally, Tomlinson wants to tap the former co-chairman of the Republican National Committee, Patricia Harrison, to step in as the permanent CEO.

What do you think now? Am I being paranoid? Recall that PBS is "state-sponsored" and now they want to make sure that the only point of view PBS is allowed to present is the government's? It's not as if we don't already know about Bush's penchant for propaganda.

You see, it's more than just reporting the news using Fox News' choice of verbiage - freedom fries, homicide bombers and the like. It's more devious than that. On Hardball, for example, they don't actually report news, they have two people screaming at each other without fact checking or a detailed examination. Swift Boat Veteran guy can scream that John Kerry is a war criminal who castrated little boys for fun, and the other guy says, "Did not!" and Chris Matthews says, "Well, that's all the time we have - good debate, gentlemen." You don't learn anything and you come away with doubt as to whether John Kerry actually might have a Vietnamese ball collection in his study (in Satan's home base, Massachusetts, home of The Kennedys - ooga-booga). PBS avoids this disturbing trend by reporting... wait for it... NEWS! Jim Lehrer, for example, might say, 17 soldiers died in Iraq today. And explain how it happened. LIBERAL BIAS!! He used facts! Bush can't maintain the throne if people are armed with facts! So Fox News will cloud the soldiers' deaths in a haze of patriotism and red herrings about propagating freedom and voting in Iraq and all the rest. That's their idea of reporting that story - if Fox News would have reported it at all.

And I'll repeat. PBS is funded by the government. It's baby steps, my friends. They take a slice of our freedom here with the Patriot Act, another slice there by threatening artists who oppose Bush, more slices by shutting the press and the public out of press conferences, putting shills in the White House press room, propaganda pieces distributed as news, arresting so-called enemies of the state without council or trial, torturing prisoners... Jesus, this sentence might never end. But how far do they have to go to get you to realize that we're sitting right in the middle of a fat, bloated empire determined to rule the world and eliminate all dissent?

How far will you allow them to go? What's your limit?