Wednesday, February 19, 2014

PBS 4 Sale

The following rant was triggered by an article written by David Sirota, a well-known journalist and activist who has worked for the Huffington Post, Sen. Bernie Sanders and THE NATION. (You can probably google his article: "REVEALING THE SECRET CORRUPTION INSIDE PBS's NEWS.")

I gave up on PBS News ten years ago on the grounds that it lived in namby-pamby land and generally supported a mildly Republican lifestyle. That had not always been the case, but in time people like Jim Lehrer lost all credibility on issues of life and death. I started watching BBC, which does not depend on corporate money to finance its news department.

David Sirota points out that PBS recently announced a new two-year series called "The Pension Peril." This series has been funded by former Enron trader John Arnold, a billionaire financing a national campaign to end public employee retirement benefits. Dick Army works for him. In Arnold's favor, he did not approach PBS with this concept. He did not set out to buy PBS News. They came to him.

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