Eric Alterman: PBS: Re-working the Refs

Eric Alterman, in his MSNBC blog Altercation (6-15-05)

[Eric Alterman is Professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, media columnist for The Nation, the “Altercation” weblogger for MSNBC.com, and a senor fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he writes and edits the “Think Again” column.]

The thing about all this PBS mishigas is that it is all based on a fictional claim; that the network leans leftward, or as Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- the agency that passes those federal funds to public broadcasters – asserts, that PBS ignores or marginalizes conservative viewpoints.

The point is that conservatives do not want liberal viewpoints spoken to the public anywhere. That’s why they are attacking the media, academia, and the Democrats’ ability to hold hearings. (See below.) CPB officials are demanding that that PBS should provide balancing comments in all programs containing editorial viewpoints and opinions. This is quite obviously silly.

You can’t balance every program, and PBS has done an extremely good job of balancing its overall content with many, many programs directed by and made for conservatives over the years by the likes of Bill Buckley, Ben Wattenberg, Milton Friedman, and Tony Brown—and there are many more. Here, for instance, is an incident I came across in Richard Parker’s biography of John Kenneth Galbraith that Eric R. reviewed so brilliantly here a few weeks ago, regarding the history of economics service Galbraith narrated and helped oversee entitled, The Age of Uncertainty, back in 1976, when all this “working the refs” stuff was just getting started. (It mirrors, by the way, the incident with PBS’s Vietnam series, in which the network turned over airtime to Reed Irvine’s ridiculous outfit for a two-hour rebuttal, again demonstrating the power that the right has had to pursue its agenda there, even when there is nothing remotely “leftist” about the topics of its complaints. See Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam companion book if you doubt that.)...