A Letter from the Friendly Forces of the Status Quo in Public Broadcasting
By Chris Weinkopf
Dear Friend of Public Broadcasting,
The beasts are out to bludgeon Big Bird. Will you let them?
You responded generously to our “Stop the Sickos From Snuffing Out Snuffleupagus” campaign. And your donation to the “Keep the Christofascists From Crucifying Clifford” telethon helped make it a lively success. (We hope you enjoyed the free tote bag!)
But once again, we need your help. The mean-spirited, anti-intellectual, censorship-loving Republicans are up to their usual dirty tricks.
Please don’t misconstrue that as a partisan statement. Being “fair and balanced” has always been a top priority at PBS. That’s why our beloved Bill Moyers unfailingly included both Democratic and Republican opponents of Bush administration policies on his programs.
But we just can’t win. As the folksy Moyers has put it: “The more compelling our journalism, the angrier became the radical right of the Republican Party. That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth.”
That’s why we seek your help today. In 2003, President George Bush hijacked our Corporation for Public Broadcasting by elevating to the chair one Kenneth Tomlinson—who had originally been appointed to the CPB by President Bill Clinton (mistakenly, we’re sure!) after serving as editor of that extreme right-wing rag Reader’s Digest. Since then, Tomlinson has launched a jihad against enlightened public broadcasting, seeking to get PBS and NPR to run liberal and conservative programming more or less equally.
Now, everyone knows that “equal time” is fascist-speak for turning PBS into another FOX News. Goodbye Mr. Rogers, hello Mr. O’Reilly.
It gets worse. Tomlinson went on to hire a Republican analyst to monitor “NOW,” the PBS current affairs show. Can you imagine that? Someone actually watching “NOW”? We couldn’t believe it, either.
Then, compounding the insult, Tomlinson appointed another Republican to be the corporation’s president and CEO. We were outraged by the naked partisanship. Oh, how we long for the good old days when President Lyndon Johnson promoted less partisan people—like Moyers, his one-time press secretary—to keep public broadcasting fair and moderate.
But here’s where things get truly weird. At the same time Republicans in the White House were working to turn CPB into a far-right propaganda machine, Republicans in Congress were trying to slash CPB funding by $100 million. Seemingly, the right wing can’t decide whether it would rather exploit us or bankrupt us.
Either way, the programming you’ve come to depend on is at risk. Imagine losing quality children’s entertainment like “Postcards from Buster,” with its delicate, age-appropriate look at a lesbian family. Imagine missing thoughtful appearances from the likes of Kofi Annan on “Sesame Street.” Try to conceive of getting by without publicly funded specials like “Frontline: The Jesus Factor,” which explored President Bush’s strange evangelical faith, or our many hard-hitting analyses of the Bush regime’s imperial reign of terror.
How are you going to make sense of the world without insightful government-funded nuggets like Bill Moyers’ pronouncement that “not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us”?
And it’s not just enlightened politics that’s at risk. Without your help, treasured PBS programs that have taught millions of children how to watch television could go by the wayside. Thanks to the budget-butchers, cherished small-screen heroes like Barney and the Teletubbies could all but disappear (save for the DVDs, Halloween costumes, board games, books, apparel lines, thermoses, nightlights, bedding, diapers, dishes, playing cards, and theme parks).
Free-market fanatics talk of the thousands of programs now available on cable. But in today’s hard-pressed America, how many PBS viewers can afford cable? That’s why we’re asking you to make a small donation of $100 in response to this month’s solicitation.
It was your contributions—coupled with the 15 percent of our budget that comes from the federal government—that let us insert a string of ads into our non-commercial line-up this summer urging Congress (successfully!) not to trim our funding.
This is what public broadcasting should be all about: using federal funds to lobby for more federal funds.
So please: Help keep us strong in our nonpartisan battle against the nation’s Republican reprobates. Only you can sustain us until the next fundraising drive. Only you can keep Big Bird from going extinct!
Most sincerely,
PBS
