[Vision2020] Ralph Nader's Take on PBS/NPR

[nickgier at roadrunner.com]

Hi Roger,

You always use the term "left-wing" rather freely.  You should hear my friends at Radio Free Moscow rail about our cowardly and center-of-the-road NPR is.  Can you answer any of Nader's facts?

Nick


In The Public Interest
PBS-NPR-Leaning Right
By Ralph Nader
3-14-11

The tumultuous managerial shakeup at National Public Radio headquarters
for trivial verbal miscues once again has highlighted the ludicrous
corporatist right-wing charge that public radio and public TV are replete
with left-leaning or leftist programming.

Ludicrous, that is, unless this criticism’s yardstick is the propaganda
regularly exuded by the extreme right-wing Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
These “capitalists” use the public’s airwaves free-of-charge to make
big money.

The truth is that the frightened executives at public TV and radio have
long been more hospitable to interviews with right of center or extreme
right-wing and corporatist talking heads than liberal or progressive
guests.

PBS’s Charlie Rose has had war-loving William Kristol on thirty one
times, Henry Kissinger fifty five times, Richard Perle ten times, the
global corporatist cheerleader, Tom Friedman seventy times. Compare that
guest list with Rose’s interviews of widely published left of center
guests—Noam Chomsky two times, William Grieder two times, Jim Hightower
two times, Charlie Peters two times, Lewis Lapham three times, Bob Herbert
six times, Paul Krugman twenty one times, Victor Navasky one time, Mark
Green five times and Sy Hersh, once a frequent guest, has not been on
since January 2005.

Dr. Sidney Wolfe, the widely-quoted super-accurate drug industry critic,
who is often featured on the commercial TV network shows, has never been
on Rose’s show. Nor has the long-time head of Citizens for Tax Justice
and widely respected progressive tax analyst, Robert McIntyre.

Far more corporate executives, not known for their leftist inclinations,
appear on Rose’s show than do leaders of environmental, consumer, labor
and poverty organizations.

In case you are wondering, I’ve appeared four times, but not since
August 2005, and not once on the hostile Terri Gross radio show.

The unabashed progressive Bill Moyer’s Show is off the air and has not
been replaced. No one can charge PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer with
anything other than very straightforward news delivery, bland opinion
exchanges and a troubling inclination to avoid much reporting that upsets
the power structures in Congress, the White House, the Pentagon or Wall
Street.

The longest running show on PBS was hard-line conservativeWilliam F.
Buckley’s show—Firing Line—which came on the air in 1966 and ended
in 1999.

Sponsorship by large corporations, such as Coca Cola and AT&T, have
abounded—a largesse not likely to be continued year after year for a
leftist media organization.

None of this deters the Far Right that presently got a majority in the
House of Representatives to defund the $422 million annual appropriation
to the umbrella entity—Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). About
15% of all revenues for all public broadcasting stations comes from this
Congressional contribution.

Though he admits to liking National Public Radio, conservative columnist
David Harsanyi, believes there is no “practical argument” left “in
the defense of federal funding…in an era of nearly unlimited
choices….”

Really? Do commercial radio stations give you much news between the
Niagara of advertisements and music? Even the frenetic news, sports,
traffic and weather flashes, garnished by ads, are either redundant or
made up of soundbytes (apart from the merely 2 minutes of CBS radio news
every half-hour). If you want serious news, features and interviews on the
radio, you go to public radio or the few community and Pacifica radio
stations.

Harsanyi continues: “Something, though, seems awfully wrong with
continuing to force taxpayers who disagree with the mission—even if
their perceptions are false—to keep giving….”

Public radio’s popular Morning Edition and All Things Considered are the
most listened to radio shows after Rush Limbaugh’s, and any taxpayer can
turn them off. Compare the relatively small public radio and TV budget
allocations with the tens of billions of dollars each year—not counting
the Wall Street bailout—in compelling taxpayers to subsidize, through
hundreds of programs, greedy, mismanaged, corrupt or polluting
corporations either directly in handouts, giveaways and guarantees or
indirectly in tax escapes, bloated contracts and grants. Can the taxpayer
turn them off?

Here is a solution that will avoid any need for Congressional
contributions to CPB. The people own the public airwaves. They are the
landlords. The commercial radio and TV stations are the tenants that pay
nothing for their 24 hour use of this public property. You pay more for
your auto license than the largest television station in New York pays the
Federal Communications Commission for its broadcasting license—which is
nothing. It has been that way since the 1927 and 1934 communication laws.

Why not charge these profitable businesses rent for use of the public
airwaves and direct some of the ample proceeds to nonprofit public radio
and public TV as well as an assortment of audience controlled TV and radio
channels that could broadcast what is going on in our country locally,
regionally, nationally and internationally? (See: Ralph Nader & Claire
Riley, Oh, Say Can You See: A Broadcast Network for the Audience, 5 J.L. &
POL. 1, [1988])

Now that would be a worthy program for public broadcasting. Get
Limbaugh’s and Hannity’s companies off welfare. Want to guess what
their listeners think about corporate welfare?