{"id":16104,"date":"2014-02-12T13:52:34","date_gmt":"2014-02-12T18:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=16104"},"modified":"2014-02-12T14:07:48","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T19:07:48","slug":"the-wolf-of-sesame-street-revealing-the-secret-corruption-inside-pbss-news-division","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2014\/02\/12\/the-wolf-of-sesame-street-revealing-the-secret-corruption-inside-pbss-news-division\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wolf of Sesame Street: Revealing the secret corruption inside PBS\u2019s news division"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks to reader SharonG for suggesting the Pando<\/em> article The Wolf of Sesame Street: Revealing the secret corruption inside PBS\u2019s news division<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

On December 18th, the Public Broadcasting Service\u2019s flagship station WNET issued a press release<\/a><\/strong> announcing the launch of a new two-year news series entitled \u201cPension Peril.\u201d The series, promoting cuts to public employee pensions, is airing on hundreds<\/a><\/strong> of PBS outlets all over the nation. It has been presented as objective news on \u00a0major PBS programs including the PBS News Hour.<\/p>\n

However, neither the WNET press release nor the broadcasted segments explicitly disclosed who is financing the series. Pando has exclusively confirmed that \u201cPension Peril\u201d is secretly funded by former Enron trader John Arnold, a billionaire political powerbroker who is actively trying to shape the very pension policy that the series claims to be dispassionately covering.
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A stealth takeover of the public airwaves<\/b><\/p>\n

A billionaire political activist like Arnold exerting financial \u2013 and thus ideological \u2013 control over PBS news programming is the culmination of a larger campaign by ideological and corporate interests to politicize public broadcasting. As Pando\u2019s Yasha Levine and others have documented, on National Public Radio that campaign has involved the radio network promoting politically<\/a><\/strong> skewed coverage of political front groups<\/a><\/strong> and corporate interests<\/a><\/strong> that are now permitted to finance NPR\u2019s journalism. That trend shows no sign of abating under NPR\u2019s new CEO<\/a><\/strong>, who came to the job after a career as a financial-industry lobbyist, Republican Party benefactor and board member of corporate-financed conservative think tanks.<\/p>\n

On PBS, the campaign has been even more intense. During fights over funding for public broadcasting during the Bush era, one FCC official told the Washington Post<\/a><\/strong> that under withering pressure from conservative ideologues and corporate special interests, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting became \u201cengaged in a systematic effort not just to sanitize the truth, but to impose a right-wing agenda on PBS.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/pre>\n
I have known that ever since Congress started pressuring PBS to have more balance (meaning more right-wing content), that PBS is no longer the source of truthful information that it was. With Congress holding part of the purse strings, what else could PBS do? It now seems that the congressional pressure has even reached the choice of CEO for NPR.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thanks to reader SharonG for suggesting the Pando article The Wolf of Sesame Street: Revealing the secret corruption inside PBS\u2019s news division. On December 18th, the Public Broadcasting Service\u2019s flagship station WNET issued a press release announcing the launch of a new two-year news series entitled \u201cPension Peril.\u201d The series, promoting cuts to public employee […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-16104","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16104"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16107,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16104\/revisions\/16107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}