Friday, July 20, 2007

Congress saves public broadcasting, again

Just about the only independent media outlets left in the States are the member stations that make up PBS (on TV) and NPR (on radio). Little noticed by most of the MSM (naturally) but not the AP newswire is a vote on Wednesday night to nix Dubya's proposal to cancel this year's subsidy to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, about $420 million. It wasn't even close in the House: 357-72.

Some will argue cable and satellite fill the niche that community-owned TV used to. That may be true to some extent. But many people still don't have the income necessary to subscribe to cable or satellite and rely solely on off-air signals with old-fashioned "rabbit ears" for their entertainment and news fix. And the Big Five are all owned by conglomerates who serve Wall Street -- or Arab sheiks who secretly fund Al Qaeda.

And would cable have had the guts to give Ken Burns the chance to even produce such memorable mini-series as The Civil War and Baseball? In the case of the former, the original broadcast was in the fall of 1990, just when the First Gulf War was starting up. It got record ratings (40 million, an impossibility even for cable) and it contributed to much of the anxiety about whether it was proper to fight a war that was about oil as much as an illegal incursion into a sovereign state. Even "Storming" Norman Swartzkopf would later write that when he and his most senior lieutenants finally got to see it in their compound in Riyadh, just prior to the war, it was a wake-up call as to just how mad armed conflict can get. He's hardly a liberal but that says something about the power of alternative media.

If Burns' upcoming series about WW II (to be broadcast in September) was instead aired before Dubya's hugely illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, would the latter have gotten away with it? I doubt it, but there would have been much more pressure, even from Fox, to get the UN on side; as happened during the first war.

As for so-called liberal bias, remember that among Republican voters (not Democrats mind you, but Republicans), remember this interesting stat: One who got most of their news from PBS or NPR was four times less likely to believe Iraq had WMD than if they listened to NBC, CBS or ABC or CNN; and six times less if they watched Fox.

It's not perfect, no more so than the CBC or BBC; but when I travel in the States, I tune into NPR for the hourly news simply because it covers both national and world news and without an agenda. I do make one exception, though: Paul Harvey and his morning "newscast" -- the guy may be quaint but nowhere near as wacky as Limbaugh or O'Reilly. And I actually learn something from the guy, not how to repeat talking points from the RNC.

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