Tea Party takes over Alabama public TV
Thursday, Aug 9, 2012 09:58 AM CDT
Tea Party takes over Alabama public TV
Conservatives in Alabama are trying to use public TV to air overtly religious content -- and winning
By Alex Seitz-Wald
Alabama was the first state in the nation to create a public television network in the early 1950s, but now, the network may be the nation’s most vulnerable, thanks to an attempted coup from its conservative overseers. A judge in the state heard testimony this week in a lawsuit on the alleged wrongful termination of the network’s former executive director and CFO, who were apparently fired after refusing to air overtly religious content. The network’s license is up for renewal this year and donations have dropped off, raising the stakes of the conflict between the network’s politically-appointed commissioners and its professional staff. Though the controversy has been largely missed by the national media thus far, it gets at the heart of key questions about religion in public life and government spending that have gripped the nation in the Obama era.
“We feel like we’re victims of a hostile takeover,” an Alabama Public Television employee who helped blow the whistle on the commissioners’ plan told Salon. The employee asked to remain anonymous because the chairman of the Alabama Educational Television Commission, the board of political appointees who oversee the network, has issued a gag order with an implicit threat of retaliation against employees who speak to the media. “This is going to set a national precedent. Everyone is gunning for public television; this is how they’re going to do it,” the source said.
At the center of the controversy is the work of David Barton, whom NPR called yesterday in an unrelated story, “The most influential evangelist you’ve never heard of.” Barton is an amateur historian who holds no advanced degrees or affiliations with universities, but has nonetheless built a massive following among conservative activists with his revisionist history that dismisses the separation of church and state as a “liberal myth” and argues that the U.S. was founded as Christian pseudo-theocracy. He’s a regular on Glenn Beck’s show; Mike Huckabee declared that he wished “there would be something like a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, forced — at gunpoint no less — to listen to every David Barton message.”
Barton’s work has been dismissed or discredited by mainstream and Christian historians alike (a professor at the evangelical Grove City College recently wrote an entire book debunking Barton’s theory on Thomas Jefferson), but Alabama’s public television commissioners wanted to air Barton’s videos. In one segment the commission considered airing, Barton gives a tour of the U.S. Capitol and declares, “The more one learns of this building, of how religion was openly embraced and practiced here, of how strongly and how openly religious our Founding Fathers and early leaders actually were, the more illogical it is to assert that America’s history requires her to maintain a secular, religion-free government and public society.” “Lots of other programs cover the negative stuff. This makes you feel good about being American,” commissioner Rodney Herring explained.
More:
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/09/tea_party_takes_over_alabama_public_tv/
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