Turning PBS into another propaganda tool

Hey Lash.....where is the promised email?

Sorry, no, - my last question was addressed to BBB.

I believe the News Hour is quite good and have no particular quarrel with that. I have seen several of Moyers shows and his bias is evident and fundamental to topic selection, point oif view, the information he choses to present and the editorial content. I listen to PBS radio dreiving hnome in the evenings and am constantly bemused with the Washington/Manhattan perspective that permeates everything. I don't think this aspect of the question really needs much demonstration. The reaction to Tomilson speaks volumes.

Georgeob1


One is Bush's funding of "faith-based" organizations. They are comprised of all political spectrums, not just the right.

Another is the tax exemption for religious organizations. Many of them violate the rules permitting them that exemption. The taxes they don't pay have to be made up by other tax payers like me.

As an atheist, I hate that my tax money is used in this manner.

Among others are the taxes I have to pay along with other taxpayers to make up for the loss of federal tax revenue for various tax evasion scams. Some of the most oderous are:

Corporation Sole. Since September 2004, the Department of Justice has obtained six injunctions against promoters of this scheme and filed complaints against 11 others. Participants apply for incorporation under the pretext of being a "bishop" or "overseer" of a one-person, phony religious organization or society with the idea that this entitles the individual to exemption from federal income taxes as a nonprofit, religious organization. When used as intended, Corporation Sole statutes enable religious leaders to separate themselves legally from the control and ownership of church assets. But the rules have been twisted at seminars where taxpayers are charged fees of $1,000 or more and incorrectly told that Corporation Sole laws provide a "legal" way to escape paying federal income taxes, child support and other personal debts.

Abuse of Charitable Organizations and Deductions. The IRS has observed an increase in the use of tax-exempt organizations to improperly shield income or assets from taxation. This can occur, for example, when a taxpayer moves assets or income to a tax-exempt supporting organization or donor-advised fund but maintains control over the assets or income, thereby obtaining a tax deduction without transferring a commensurate benefit to charity. A "contribution" of a historic facade easement to a tax-exempt conservation organization is another example. In many cases, local historic preservation laws already prohibit alteration of the home's facade, making the contributed easement superfluous. Even if the facade could be altered, the deduction claimed for the easement contribution may far exceed the easement's impact on the value of the property.
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During the last three months, I couldn't avoid attempts at religious indoctrination via the media. First there was the Terri Schiavo case, then the Pope became ill, then Easter arrived, then the Pope died, and finally a new Pope was elected. These events dominated the news and it was almost impossible to avoid it. Add to that the Religious Right majority of the Republican Party's attempt to take over the entire US government and the constant coverage by news networks, especially cable. To try to avoid spin I watch C-SPAN to get the actual words of speakers. C-SPAN is my favorite network---even ahead of PBS. I love it's weekend book and panel discussions coverage, which represent all political point's of view. Would the government try to shut down C-SPAN or dictate it's coverage?

BBB

Blatham

I couldn't believe George wrote that........I had to read it 3 times to understand it then I went back to what BBB wrote......that's what he was responding to.

BBB,

I dfon't think your choices here in any way prove or backup your original point. I know nothing of "Corporation Sole", but it sounds like a common tax dodge, of which there are innumerable variants. In what way does the government affirmatively advance this?

There are many "abusers" of charitable tax deductions, and I'll bet the overwhelming majority have nothing whatever to do with religion. Would you prefer that all such tax deductions be eliminated?

Sorry that you were offended at the reporting of the Pope's death & the subsequent election. However this wasn't in any way government supported - it was the voulutary action of priovate media responding to what they perceive to be publiv viewing interest.

You haven't backed up your original point at all here.

So, you've watched the Newshour and it is fine.

You've watch several? Moyers shows and his bias was evident in topic and presentation. Can you recall more detail as I can likely find those exact shows in archives. Perhaps it was the one where he interviewed Grover Norquist, or the one where he interviewed Luntz. That is, where he invited them on to tell their side.

But anyway, that's your PBS viewing history over the last five years. On what goddamn evidentiary basis is that to swallow this indictment that PBS is ubiquitously leftist? Why do you swallow this so easily and without analysis?

Georgeob1


I guess it's all in your viewpoint. Or the old saying, It depends on whose ox is being gored.

BBB

Blatham,

You are being untypically overbearing here. What the hell is your goddamn "evidentiary basis" for a contrary view? I made no attempt to provide a complete list of my exposure to PBS - rather a reasonably brief sample to address the point, good and bad elements of it.

Are you attempting to deny that there is a decidedly liberal bias in our PBS? Do you suggest that MR Tomlinson is attempting to distort a simon pure organization that is above all that? Are the right wing commentators who push this idea wasting their time? Are you suggesting that Bill Moyers has no political agenda behind his broadcasts?

Have you ever considered the number of US holidays that are based on religion? I guess if you are not an atheist or a member of a non-Christain faith, you might not notice government tax income that supports such holidays.

Christmas
Thanksgiving

Is Martin Luther King, Jr. a holiday for a national leader or a minister? I choose to honor him as a national leader.

Then there are other national religion-based traditions that are not holidays. A few are:

Easter
Saint Patrick's Day
Halloween
Good Friday

BBB

Would anyone care to second my motion that we ban all holidays in order to promote some productivity from the mass of gov't (State and Federal) burearucrats who now are always away from their desks. A pox on whoever created ...... voice mail.

Let's start with Christmas and Martin Luther King day. Which do you think would create the biggest explosion?

george

I am on you for swallowing a notion for which you have less than paltry personal evidence to support. Dumb and false ideas get spread in exactly this way. Even if what you claim is so, you have no good reason to agree with it.

You and others here, forward the notion of a 'left wing media bias' and not one of you that I've bumped into has done even the slightest amount of careful research into the claim. Not one of you.

None of you has demonstrated even the slightest interest in investigating who was involved in dismantling the 'Fairness Doctrine", where the funding for that push originated nor in the political affiliations of those involved.

Not a single one of you has apparently taken any close look at media ownership.

Each time I post a quote from Bill Kristol ("claiming the media is biased left is like working the refs") or Karl Rove ("the problems isn't so much that the media is liberal as that it is oppositional"), you folks flit on by those quotes as if they had never been said.

And none of you have the slightest question arise in your noggins when Goerring voices the mechanics of media control, because you simply don't want to conceive that the same tricks, with similar intent behind it, might be at play in your nation.

Jefferson's warning cannot apply, now, to you. It just can't. It's impossible that it would.

The organization which Tomlinson has been placed in charge of has the opposite task of what he is doing. Opposite. 180 degrees opposite. But that's all ok, even a good thing, because there is a left wing media bias.

Given that you and enough other people simply buy this repeated and repeated claim, without doing any kind of analysis for yourselves to actually test its veracity, opens the door to your own manipulation by those who can gain from that.

If fairness is the thing, equal presentation of all voices, then the Fairness Doctrine or a similar modern version, will be the route to take. But just try to re-institute it. The campaign to stop re-instituion will be HUGE and incredibly well-funded. A truly independent media gets in the way of a lot of people's interests, it always has.

Thanksgiving is hardly a religious holiday - many quite properly modern liberal countries have analogs to it. Halloween has both Christian and pagan origins and it is not a holiday. Easter is not a holiday and even referencves to it are being suppressed: ever heard of Spring Break? Christmans is indeed an exception, however that too is being secularized with "happy hiolidays". I'll grant you that one thouigh and will be interested to watch your campaign to suppress it.

So back to your statement of the proposition - the number of national holidays, based on religion. Answer ONE.

Blathan,

I oppose the so called fairness doctrine because I put more value on free speech than governmental controls to ensure some mindless bureaucrat's concept of fairness.

Corporations of various types control most of the media now as throughout our history. Each applies whatever bias (or lack of it) it wishes to hold its audience and its principal employees. There is an historical pattern of left wing bias throughout this establishment over the past fifty or so years. New voices, such as Fox have emerged which use the same venal tricks, but with a different bias, and that drives the old establishment cvrazy. The truth is the new variant is no better nor worse than the old - just differently directed.

PBS is a publicly funded operation and it is therefore accountable to the public for its actions. It is all-to-evident that its entrenched figures and interest groups are resisting that accountability. Indeed some are outraged that the ignorant masses could have ideas contrary to those that they work so hard to insert into the public mind. PBS is a remedy in search of a problem. We just don't need it.

The burden of proof is not where you imagine it to be. I know the origin of my own opinions, and I have done as mush to lay a foundation for them as you have for yours. I can't speak for the other posters here, and I am inclined to be skeptical of one who presumes to speak for them.

Your arrogance has reached a new pinnacle......according to your rant, only YOU have the intellectual curiosity and drive to follow thru with the search for irrefutable evidence of the.....TRUTH. Only ...... YOU ......have the high intellect to PROPERLY interpret what you read and ONLY YOU have the intellectual capacity to arrive at the only conclusion possible

Only you..........

No, there's actually lots of us.

george

I'm afraid this topic is somewhat depressing. How familiar are you with the situation in Italy and the media ownership/control which the leader there now maintains?

You might have been on a thread where I mentioned an interview I saw with Ted Turner where he related (he was talking about his life, it wasn't a political discussion) a conversation he had had recently with his friend Tony Blair. He'd advised Tony to put some reigns on Murdoch because of his growing power in Brit politics. Tony answered "I can't touch him. If it weren't for Murdoch, I wouldn't be the PM."

Media ownership in the US has consolidated drastically in the last twenty years. The present does not equal the past.

We've tried to have this discussion before. You consider that free speech is best achieved through the evisceration of any and all government controls. I consider that that makes as much sense as assuming peace and order are best achieved through firing all police forces.

It is now five or six corporations which own/control almost all media to which people have regular access. Given further FCC moves towards deregulation, that number will decrease. These corporations, as you know, are not well served (from their viewpoints) by an independent media who might oppose them. Their interests are varied and vast.

Will it be fine when and if it becomes two corporations controlling the news and commentary the citizens of the US have regular access to?

Blathem

The left has a paranoia that the press will be taken over by conservative money. If that is your thesis, then it is only logical that Soros with all his Billions and Billions could buy many of the newspapers/ TV networks to counter Murdock and his wannabes. The reason he doesn't is obvious isn't it.....he doesn't need to because they are already spouting leftist propanda better than he ever could.

My fear of the media has already been demonstrated by Cronkite........when the media has the power to determine the outcome of a war.........that, my friend is REAL power.

I have my own opinions, as evidently does Rayban, concerning the degree to which systematic bias may exist in the media, what might be done about it, and what may be the side effects of the various remedies that might be applied. The difference is that I generally keep my opinions of the characters and personalities behind the posts here to myself.

Blatham is an exception in that I know him fairly well, respect his grasp of complex issues and trust his candor. We disagree about several fundamental principles, and those disagreements often are expressed in the different viewpoints we apply to questions such as this. That generally makes his views very interesting to me even if neither of us is particularly effective in persuading the other. That is not always the case with others.

Blatham,

My impression is that for the last several decades the media has generally been heavily biased towards what in the U.S. is called a Liberal viewpoint on political and social matters. A result is that since (say) 1963 and the mythification of John F. kennedy, there has been a pronounced net liberal; bias in the mainstream media. Prior to that there were a number of prominent largely Republican newspapers, but even they have been reduced in number. Recently the consolidation of the corporate ownership of the broadcast media has altered the structure a bit, however, even in a world with the Fox network, the fact remains that the majority of broadcast outlets are in what can be called liberal hands. The Washington Times and New York Post are certainly conservative in their outlook, but it would be a stretch to say that they dominate the New York Times & Washington Post in their reach and potential influence.

I'm not suggesting that one form of bias is any better than another, but it is certainly no worse. I despair of finding any method of "controlling" this balance that doesn't materially risk doing more mischief than the problem it attempts to solve.

With respect to PBS, the very fact that there are concerns expressed on both sides of the political divide about the perceived bias in its reporting and the appropriateness (or lack of it) in attempts to alter the set point, is an apt demonstration of the hazards of government money and control on the avenues of public information. Conservatives perceive liberal bias and seek ways to0 correct it. liberals deny that perception, declaring that the present state is more or less perfect and any attempt to alter it is a conspiracy to control the public discourse. Who is correct?

not that much of a issue with me, but I would like to offer the opinion that bias can and often does make a signficant difference due to its roots. Bias can detract from the value of information- be neutal or add. So it's not the degree of bias that is problematic, it's the degree to which information is distorted.

dys,

Do you then think either the right or the left do more distortion in their repporting than the other?

I think that distortion in one form or another is the inescapable symptom of bias of any kind. It takes many forms, ranging from the selective exclusion or inclusion of detail, the selection of what is reported, the point of view implicit in the reporting, or even the accuracy, real or implied of that which is reported.

An element of the Moyers piece that opened this thread I found particularly interesting was his criticism of the superficial reporting of the mainstream media, focused as it is on the sayings and actions of the various political actors on the public stage, as opposed to the indepth examination of the issues themselves. Clearly he placed his efforts on a higher plane precisely because of the in depth nature of his reporting. He also implicitly implied that, because of that, his reporting was necessarily above reproach. In fact is is the values based in depth nature of his discourse that itself permits the greater and often more subtle introduction of bias than in a merely superficial recitation of the statements of the contending poilitical actors. These are not easy questions and the introduction of public money makes the stakes higher for all.