Word: pbs
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...then wants to kill one of the essential means of its spread and improvement, the National Endowment for the Humanities. It laments the depravity of network and cable TV, especially in the stew of commercial gunk it serves up to children, then wants to cut all federal funding for PBS, the only source of decent educational programming for children and of intelligent documentaries for grownups...
...concerned, there's nothing public about [PBS]," Gingrich crowed to a roomful of like-minded enthusiasts in Washington's Capitol Hill Club last February. "It's an elitist enterprise. Rush Limbaugh is public broadcasting." Yeah, and so is Howard Stern--and Jenny Jones is Ken Burns, and Tom Clancy is Toni Morrison. The fact is that no system with as broad and loyal an audience base as PBS repeatedly garners can be called elitist. A national poll conducted for PBS by Opinion Research Corp. indicates that fully 84% of Americans want to see PBS funding maintained or increased and that...
...Newt and his -oids resent PBS's small measure of independence from "market forces"--from corporate and hence, ultimately, political control. More important still, the Republicans want a carcass they can toss to their extreme right. The Christian Coalition and other Fundamentalists, such as the Rev. Donald Wildmon's religious hit squad, the American Family Association, believe PBS is a factory of pinko, homosexual, you-name-it agitprop and want to see it abolished for love of censorship...
Some lefties they have there on PBS: William F. Buckley Jr., Ben Wattenberg and that far-famed enemy of capitalism Louis Rukeyser. Like Pat Robertson's views on "creation science," this belief hinges on ignoring the fossil evidence. Sure, PBS has run programs exposing business fraud, supporting homosexual and other minority claims to rights, satirizing religion (however mildly) and questioning some government practices. Sometimes it has been guilty of "imbalance," but at least it hasn't completely succumbed to the emasculating belief that every assertion in a given program should be at once neutralized by its opposite. Compared with public...
...conservatives' thrust against PBS, therefore, seems to be faltering. On this Gingrich is too extreme for his own troops. The Speaker of the House, when he speaks on cultural affairs, is truly a wonder. Here he is, prating and preening like a parrot on a stump about the need to renew American civilization. This is the guy who hates the '60s but reincarnates them in his 40-acres-and-a-laptop Utopianism; who thinks kitsch "futurologists" like Alvin and Heidi Toffler are gurus and that a fund-raising cultist like Arianna Huffington is an intellectual. He filled his cable...