Abstract

PBS Adds Insult to Injury

The article comments on the PBS decision to broadcast Tucker Carlson as a "balance" to the television program, "Now With Bill Moyers." PBS is creating a show around CNN's conservative talking head Tucker Carlson, and creating a program for the extremist editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Still, the insult of throwing up Carlson to quiet the whining of crybaby conservatives pales in comparison to the injury of offering up millions of dollars in taxpayer and viewer-donated resources of our public broadcasting service to the far-right ideologues behind the Journal Editorial Report. It's difficult to imagine a more calculated effort to undermine PBS's intended mission of providing alternative programming than this subsidy to a wealthy, conservative corporation to produce yet another right-wing cable chat show. When Moyers retires at the end of the year, his chosen replacement will be David Brancaccio, a reporter who comes from that hotbed of anticapitalist agitation, NPR's Marketplace. Given the right's domination of television talk shows and its already strong representation on public broadcasting, the only imaginable explanation for the decision to put PBS resources in the hands of well-financed, well-distributed, unabashedly partisan and journalistically challenged ideologues can be naked political pressure.