PBS goes all squishy

I've already written once on the Republican attempt to take over PBS and ensure that it becomes yet another conservative media outlet. Well, Eric Boehlert has a piece in Salon today that I'd highly recommend. The overall impression I get is that the folks at PBS have been making the same mistake that Democrats made over the last few years-- the Neville Chamberlain strategem. They keep making more and more concessions to the right-wingers, and haven't learned yet that the neo-fascists are only interested in total control. Here's an eye-opener from the article that utterly gives the lie to the whole right-wing attempt to take over PBS:

"Because, according to public television insiders, the first batch of polling done in 2002 produced unsatisfactory results from the CPB board's perspective; it showed little viewer concern about bias. "Tomlinson commissioned two polls. The first results were too good, and he didn't believe them," says one source. "After the Iraq war, the board commissioned another round of polling, and they thought they'd get worse results." But the board didn't. Asked specifically about PBS's war coverage, only 7 percent of respondents thought it was "slanted." "They couldn't use any of it" to bolster any claims of bias, says the source. Overall, just 21 percent of respondents thought PBS was too liberal.

Of course, if Tomlinson and his colleagues were looking for good news about PBS instead of bad, the wider poll results -- a healthy 80 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of public broadcasting -- would have been trumpeted as a triumph. (In an NPR interview aired last weekend, Tomlinson suggested that that 80 percent should be higher.) Meanwhile, a strong majority thinks PBS's news and information programming is more trustworthy, and more in-depth, than that of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN. Most viewers think PBS is a "valuable cultural resource," and a plurality of 48 percent want the government to provide more funding to PBS. (Only 10 percent want it to provide less.) But despite the good news, the CPB board refused to tout these results or even release them independently."