In Defense of NPR by Bill Moyers

[no_hypocrisy]

Consider an America without public media. Consider a society where the distortions and dissembling would go unchallenged, where fact-based reporting is eliminated.



Come on now: let's take a breath and put this National Public Radio (NPR) fracas into perspective.

Just as public radio struggles against yet another assault from its longtime nemesis - the right-wing machine that would thrill if our sole sources of information were Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and ads paid for by the Koch Brothers - it walks into a trap perpetrated by one of the sleaziest operatives ever to climb out of a sewer.


First, in the interest of full disclosure: While not presently committing journalism on public television, the two of us have been colleagues on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) for almost 40 years (although never for NPR). We've lived through every one of the fierce and often unscrupulous efforts by the right to shut down both public television and radio. Our work has sometimes been the explicit bull's eye on the dartboard as conservative ideologues sought to extinguish the independent reporting and analysis they find so threatening to their phobic worldview.


We have come to believe, as so many others have, that only the creation of a substantial trust fund for public media will free it from the whims and biases of the politicians, including Democratic politicians (yes, after one of our documentaries tracking President Clinton's scandalous fundraising in the mid-1990's, the knives were sharpened on the other side of the aisle).


Richard Nixon was the first to try to shut down public broadcasting, strangling and diverting funding, attacking alleged bias and even placing public broadcasters Sander Vanocur and Robert MacNeil on his legendary enemies list. Nixon didn't succeed, and, ironically, his downfall was brought about in part by public television's nighttime rebroadcasts of the Senate Watergate hearings, exposing his crimes and misdemeanors to a wider, primetime audience.

-more-
http://www.alternet.org/media/150222/in_defense_of_npr/

[malaise]

1. K & R

Damn I miss Bill Moyers

[jannyk]

3. Me too - Friday evenings are not the same since he left. nt

[yellowwood]

2. Let's Be Honest

If the right wing hates NPR so much and is working so hard to shut it down, it must really be good!

Contact your Congresspersons to save the little bit of public funding that it gets.

If you haven't taken a look at NPR recently to see all that it offers, look now. I especially enjoy their music section.

http://www.npr.org/

[bread_and_roses]

4. oh, phhhhfffffttttttttt....NPR serves the exact function Hedges described - serving our Corporate

Masters by pretending that a narrow frame of debate between Tweedledum and Tweedledee is meaningful. They don't even use the indisputable facts that are readily available and that are, for instance, posted on this site regularly - not to mention on Commondreams/Alternet/Democracynow/etc. to counter the literally insane talking points of our Oligarch Overlords.

Their reliance on corporate sponsorship and the winds of political popularity have made them worthless.