The truth is, from Nixon to Trump, Republicans were actually rather successful in manipulating the CPB to serve their partisan agenda. Back in 2005, when Republican Kenneth Tomlinson was in charge, the New York Times reported that the chairman aggressively pressed “public television to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias.” The chief executive of PBS even accused Tomlinson of threatening “editorial independence.”
Then as now, PBS had an “elite, pro-business slant” that made its programming difficult to distinguish from corporate news programs.
FAIR studied public affairs shows in 1999 and concluded that they lacked “consumer advocates or public interest voices.” The shows regularly featured government officials, so-called professional journalists, and “corporate/Wall Street representatives.” In fact, “Not a single representative of organized labor appeared in discussions of corporate mergers or of layoffs.”
This is what cancer does. It spreads throughout a healthy body and destroys all of the healthy cells; replacing them with twisted mutations, that will go forth and ravage more and more until — in the end — nothing is left but a rotting corpse.
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The public should have stepped up.
