For example take that last piece by Rush on the fictious thesis by President Obama

................Rush is not a News show, it is like what happened to Oprah when she put on the author of "A million little pieces"

If a station commentators are unbiased does that mean they have to be politically neutral? please identify for me one station that employs commentators with no political preferences

Rush is not a News show, it is like what happened to Oprah when she put on the author of "A million little pieces"

My point is that there is a strong liberal bias in the mainstream media. There is not even the recognition that they have a liberal bias. Instead all that some people see is that Fox News is not a purely liberal network unlike the others.

No, there isn't. Most American "mainstream" new organizations (with the exception of on public broadcasting) pitch somewhere between middle/moderate and right of center. The problem is that "mainstream" Americans are so conservative that they don't realize that what they consider to be "liberal" is nothing of the sort--it just isn't right wing. FOX is a reactionary propaganda machine, not an alternative "news" source.

The book "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News" by Bernard Goldberg is a comprehensive study of the liberal bias in the media. As I recall over 85% of the media identifies themselves as Democrats, that might explain it.

Fox News “is not really news,” said David Axelrod on ABC. “It’s pushing a point of view.”

The fact that Bernie Goldberg thinks it doesn't make it true. His conclusions have been questioned by any number of people. Essentially, if you are a right winger (like him) then yes, you think that the mainstream media is "liberal."

Again, publicly funded media (radio and TV) provide a happy exceptions to this.

The book "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News" by Bernard Goldberg is a comprehensive study of the liberal bias in the media.

Please name one conservative show on PBS radio or television.

PBS Panders to Right With New Programming

9/17/04

A new public television program called the Journal Editorial Report, featuring writers and editors from the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page, will debut tonight on public television stations around the country. The show joins Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered, hosted by conservative CNN pundit Tucker Carlson, and a planned program featuring conservative commentator Michael Medved as part of what many see as politically motivated decisions to bring more right-wing voices to public television.

According to reports in the public broadcasting newspaper Current (1/19/04, 6/7/04) and in the New Yorker (6/7/04), conservative complaints about the alleged liberal bias of the program Now With Bill Moyers contributed to the momentum to "balance" the PBS lineup. The new programs seem to be the result of that pressure. In fact, Now will soon see its role on public television diminish, as the program is cut from one hour to 30 minutes when Moyers voluntarily leaves the program later this year. He will be replaced by co-anchor David Brancaccio, formerly of the public radio business show Marketplace, who expresses no obvious ideology. If Carlson, Medved and the staff of the Wall Street Journal editorial page are all necessary to balance the liberal Moyers, by 2005 there will be no one on PBS to balance them.

At the center of this controversy is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which provides significant federal funding for public broadcasting projects. Two Bush appointees to the board last year, Cheryl Halpern and Gay Hart Gaines, are big donors to the Republican Party, and do not hide their political agenda. As Common Cause noted in December 2003, Gaines raised money for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga), and chaired his political action committee, GOPAC: "At the same time that Gaines was raising money for Gingrich's GOPAC, Gingrich was pushing Congress to cut all federal funds to public TV."

At a confirmation hearing for Halperin, Sen. Trent Lott (R.-Miss.) criticized a commentary by Moyers as "the most blatantly partisan, irresponsible thing I've ever heard in my life," adding that "the CPB has not seemed to be willing to deal with Bill Moyers and that type of programming." Halperin responded: "The fact of the matter is, I agree," though she said at the time there was little the CPB could do about it.

But, evidently, there is something the CPB could do. According to Ken Auletta's investigation in the New Yorker, the calls for drafting right-wing voices were being heard at PBS. Auletta reported that PBS president Pat Mitchell met with Lynne Cheney and conservative television producer Michael Pack to discuss a possible PBS series about Cheney's children's books. Though the project seemed to stall, Pack was soon appointed senior vice-president for television programming at the CPB.

Auletta also reported that after Gingrich told Mitchell that there weren't enough conservatives on PBS, Mitchell "proposed to Gingrich that he co-host a PBS town-hall program," an idea that was frustrated by Gingrich's contract with Fox News Channel.

As the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act proposed, public broadcasting should have "instructional, educational and cultural purposes" and should address "the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities."

Instead, public television has in practice largely been a home for elite viewpoints, dominated by long-running political shows hosted by conservatives (Firing Line, McLaughlin Group, One on One) and by business shows aimed at the investing class (Nightly Business Report, Adam Smith's Money World, Wall $treet Week). When this line-up wasn't enough to insulate public TV from right-wing complaints in the mid-1990s, programmers responded by creating more series for conservatives like Peggy Noonan (Peggy Noonan on Values) and Ben Wattenberg (Think Tank).

Now PBS seems once again to be trying to placate right-wing critics, in this case by bringing to public broadcasting voices already well-represented in the mainstream media. Tucker Carlson's take on world affairs, for example, is available at least five days a week on CNN; it's not clear that he would say anything different on PBS, though in a test show (L.A. Times, 6/18/04) he referred to the Democratic convention's diversity goals as "a new affirmative action plan for gays, lesbians and cross-dressers," and called Indian evangelist Dr. K.A. Paul a "spiritual adviser to the scum of the Earth." ("He's willfully non-P.C.," explained WETA programming chief Dalton Delan.)

And the Wall Street Journal editorial page, included in every edition of the nation's second-largest newspaper, is already widely available--and widely read. Ironically, the Journal has long been hostile to the notion of publicly funded broadcasting: After it was discovered that some public TV stations were selling their donors lists to political parties, a 1999 Journal editorial advised: "In a better world all this would lead Congress to do what it should have done a long time ago: cut off the public tap, freeing Barney, Big Bird and the other wonderful PBS creations to find a profitable niche on cable without having to shill for public television's other, more politicized, offerings."

The Journal's Paul Gigot, who's hosting the new show, said that it was not hypocritical for the Journal to now get on the public tap, saying (Boston Globe, 8/30/04): "We're putting up an enormous amount of resources in terms of staff time and energy. I don't think this is a free lunch."

PBS president Mitchell defended the recent programming decisions, telling a meeting of TV reporters (Miami Herald, 7/10/04): ''I suppose that we're being accused on the one side of being too liberal and on the other of being too conservative probably means we're getting it mostly right."

Given that PBS is responding to conservative complaints by adding more conservative shows, and is not responding in any substantive way to progressive complaints, one can only conclude that if the network had been "getting it mostly right," it'll now just be getting mostly right-wing.

There is one audience that seems pleased: Republican senators who were among PBS's most vocal critics. Coincidentally or not, as these discussions about programming and political bias were heating up, the Senate Commerce Committee was discussing the re-authorization of the CPB's funding. The committee convened to discuss the matter in late July; though the subject of liberal bias came up, even Lott "noted progress" on that front (Public Broadcasting Report, 7/23/04).

CPB was initially intended to be a "heat shield" for public broadcasting, protecting programmers from political pressures from partisan lawmakers who control the purse strings. It's long since become a mechanism for transmitting Congress' ideological desires to public broadcasting, and the new shows announced for public TV show that it's very effective in that role.

ACTION: Please ask PBS's Pat Mitchell what new shows are planned to balance the new conservative-oriented public TV shows.

CONTACT:

PBS
Pat Mitchell, President and CEO

viewer@pbs.org
Phone: (703) 739-5000
Fax: (703) 739-5777

Or use the PBS comment form:
http://www.pbs.org/aboutsite/aboutsite_emailform.html

You might also want to contact your local PBS affiliate about PBS's rightward lurch:
http://www.pbs.org/stationfinder/index.html

PBS Scrutiny Raises Political Antennas

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 22, 2005

Liberal commentator Bill Moyers is out on PBS stations. Buster the animated rabbit is under a cloud of suspicion. And right-wing yakkers from the Wall Street Journal editorial page have been handed their own public-television chat show.

Some observers, including people inside the Public Broadcasting Service, see these recent developments as troubling. PBS, they say, is being forced to toe a more conservative line in its programming by the Republican-dominated agency that provides about $30 million in federal funds to the Alexandria-based service.

Officials at the agency, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, say they are merely seeking to ensure balance and fairness in the network's presentation of political news and ideas.

Under its mandate from Congress, which created the agency in 1967, CPB is required to act as an independent buffer between lawmakers and public broadcasters, although it can set broad programming goals. Appointees of President Bush currently control the majority of seats on CPB's eight-member board. Each board member serves a six-year term.

Typically one of the quietest bureaucracies in Washington, the quasi-governmental CPB has been unusually active in recent weeks. CPB this month appointed a pair of veteran journalists to review public TV and radio programming for evidence of bias, the first time in CPB's 38-year history that it has established such positions. PBS officials were unaware that the corporation intended to review its news and public affairs programs, such as "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" and "Frontline," until the appointments were publicly announced.

In negotiations with PBS earlier this year, the corporation also insisted, for the first time, on tying new funding to an agreement that would commit the network to strict "objectivity and balance" in each of its programs -- an idea that PBS's general counsel described in an internal memo as amounting to "government encroachment on and supervision of program content, potentially in violation of the First Amendment."

Late last week, CPB's board declined to renew the contract of its chief executive, Kathleen Cox, a veteran administrator at the agency. She was replaced by Ken Ferree, a Republican who had been a top adviser to Michael Powell, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The Ferree appointment followed the dismissals or departures in recent months of at least three other senior CPB officials, all of whom had Democratic affiliations.

"We don't want to be alarmist, but I would be less than honest if I said there wasn't concern here," said one senior executive at PBS, who insisted on anonymity because CPB provides about 10 percent of its annual budget. "When you put it all together, a pattern starts to emerge."

A senior FCC official, who would not speak for attribution because he must rule on issues affecting public broadcasting, went further, saying CPB "is engaged in a systematic effort not just to sanitize the truth, but to impose a right-wing agenda on PBS. It's almost like a right-wing coup. It appears to be orchestrated."

... congressional Republicans have been generally critical of public broadcasting's news and informational programming for years, saying it favors liberal ideas. These criticisms fueled a movement led by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich to "zero out" CPB's federal funding a decade ago. Those efforts failed; federal appropriations to CPB have grown 40 percent since then, to some $386.8 million this year. About 90 percent of this money is passed directly to public radio and TV stations, which then pay fees to PBS and National Public Radio for programming such as "Nova" and "All Things Considered."

However, conservatives were exercised that Moyers -- an outspoken liberal -- was involved in hosting a weekly newsmagazine called "Now." (Moyers left the show in December, citing personal reasons.) PBS responded, in part, by trying to recruit Gingrich to host a weekly program. It wound up developing public affairs shows starring the Wall Street Journal's conservative pundits and Tucker Carlson, a columnist for the conservative Weekly Standard and a co-host of CNN's "Crossfire." (Carlson has since left PBS and CNN for a job at MSNBC.)

Wayne Godwin, PBS's veteran chief operating officer, said in an interview yesterday that he wanted to give CPB's new chief executive, Ferree, some time before he drew conclusions. "They're in such a significant state of flux at this time that we want to be fair in looking at it," he said.

Please list the conservative commentators or newscasters on MSNBC or the mainstream media.

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate confirms Faux News is NOT a news organization

think it's funny that Faux isn't even covering Presidential press conferences in the afternoon anymore. They either have pundit talking over the President or they just say "If you want to watch the speech, go to our website".

Whether you agree or disagree with it, isn't our governmental policy news that everyone should at least be aware of?

I hope you are not calling my title misleading???

How can CNN have more total viewers when Fox has such a commanding lead in average viewers? Conventional industry wisdom is that CNN viewers tune in briefly to catch up on news and headlines, while Fox viewers watch longer for the opinion and
personality-driven programming. Because the smaller total number of Fox viewers are watching more hours, they show up in the ratings as a higher average number of viewers. CNN regularly claims a cume about 20 percent higher than Fox’s (Deseret Morning News, 1/12/04). For instance, in April 2003, during the height of the fighting in Iraq, CNN’s cume was significantly higher than Fox’s: 105 million viewers tuned into CNN compared to 86 million for Fox (Cablefax, 4/30/03). But in the same period, the ratings reported by most media outlets had Fox in the lead, with an average of 3.5 million viewers to CNN’s 2.2 million.

Although Obama might be a good teleprompter reader, people are getting tired of hearing him this often.

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate confirms Faux News is NOT a news organization

Reagan held an average of 6 press conferences A YEAR.

In one week Obama had THREE.

Reagan held an average of 6 press conferences A YEAR.

In one week Obama had THREE.