Broadcasting & Cable (3/17/10) spoke with the head of PBS's flagship New York station about the recent hire of Newsweek editor Jon Meacham and former MTV and NPR host Alison Stewart for PBS's forthcoming program Need to Know, which is replacing Now and the Bill Moyers Journal:

WNET.org president Neal Shapiro did not rule out the possibility of future synergies between Newsweek and Need to Know.

"We haven't talked about anything specific," he said. "But I think all kinds of natural synergies may happen."

Shapiro said he is not concerned that Stewart and Meacham, who has been a frequent guest on Charlie Rose as well as MSNBC's Morning Joe, will bring ideological baggage to the program.

"They are both are incredibly smart. And I think, given their intellect, neither are people you can pigeonhole left or right. I think they have a history of asking probing questions on all sides."

"Given their intellect" they can't be placed on the left or the right? Yeah, smart people are all centrists, I guess. And by "probing," Shapiro must mean something like treating sources with "charity and dignity and respect."

I'm also looking forward to public television giving us Newsweek synergies. It's hard to think of a better use of PBS resources than providing another platform for commercial journalism.  Maybe if we're really lucky we'll get some Mac Margolis on Need to Know.

FAIR has a new Action Alert reacting to reports that PBS's replacement for the retiring Bill Moyers and the canceled Now series will be headed by Newsweek editor Jon "Center-Right Nation" Meacham. To learn more or to send a message to PBS ombud Michael Getler, click here. Feel free to leave copies of your responses in the comments thread here.

PBS's NewsHour's  Gwen Ifill (9/15/09), quizzing Richard Goldstone on his U.N. fact-finding mission that found that both Israel and Palestinian fighters had committed war crimes in the Gaza conflict:

The term "even-handed" is the problem that Israel has with the conclusions in the report. Your criticism of Israel seems so much harsher than that of the Palestinians. Why is that?

CBS News (9/9/09), summarizing a report by Israel's leading human rights group:

Well over half of nearly 1,400 Palestinians killed in Israel's Gaza war were civilians, including 252 children younger than 16, a leading Israeli human rights groups said Wednesday, challenging Israel's claim that most of the dead were militants.... The Israeli rights group B'Tselem on Wednesday published figures it said were compiled in months of research, including visits to families of victims. It said 1,387 Gazans were killed, including 773 civilians and 330 combatants. Thirteen Israelis also died, including four civilians.

So why would the U.N. be more interested in the war crimes that killed nearly 200 times as many people? Thanks to Ifill and the NewsHour for challenging this strange moral reasoning.

A Tiny Revolution's John Caruso (9/5/09) caught an instance of the Public Broadcasting System "Putting the 'BS' in PBS" when they recently "took a break to blandish us thusly: 'If you are seeking a unique sponsorship opportunity for your business and want to reach a prime demographic group through multiple platforms email us today.'"

Reacting to the crass appeal for a California Bay Area underwriter, Caruso reminds the broadcasters: "C'mon, guys, we're sitting right here. Can't you at least do us the courtesy of being subtle about the fact that as far as you're concerned, we're nothing but pairs of eyes for corporate sponsors?"

Citing 15-year-old FAIR warnings of the hazards of such "enhanced underwriting," Caruso also remembers

a day not that long ago when PBS's purpose was to provide, you know, broadcasting services for the public. Now that they're just selling audiences to advertisers like the rest of the corporate media, they really should change the name—though I suppose "Supplier of Prime Demographic Groups to Underwriters through Multiple Platforms" doesn't quite have the same ring (and SPDGUMP doesn't exactly roll off the tongue either).

Caruso even has a suggested rewrite of their longtime "standard sponsorship message as well": "This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from Upwardly Mobile Middle Class Consumers Like You. Thank You! But seriously, we're just as happy getting our money from ExxonMobil."

Longtime health insurance company bigwig and former holder of "the ultimate PR job," Wendell Potter recently told PBS' Bill Moyers (Bill Moyers Journal, 7/10/09) how he had been "involved in the campaign by the industry to discredit Michael Moore and his film Sicko," and now sees that "the industry is resorting to the same tactics they've used... back in the early '90s, when they were leading the effort to kill the Clinton plan" for national healthcare reform.

Potter told Moyers that he "knew that 47 million people were uninsured, but I didn't put faces with that number" until he "picked up the local newspaper and I saw that a healthcare expedition was being held a few miles up the road." Seeing "people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care," sparked his defection from the PR machine, and ultimately moved him to appear on Moyers' show to describe the insurance companies' fear of "high-profile cases":

When you have a case like that--a family or a patient goes to the news media and complains about having some coverage denied that a doctor had recommended. In this case, Nataline Sarkisyan's doctors at UCLA had recommended that she have a liver transplant. But when the coverage request was reviewed at Cigna, the decision was made to deny it.

It was around that time, also, that the family had gone to the media, had sought out help from the California Nurses Association and some others to really bring pressure to bear on Cigna. And they were very successful in getting a lot of media attention, and nothing like I had ever seen before....

It got everyone's attention. Everyone was focused on that in the corporate offices.

Unfortunately, the U.S. press' general attention toward the larger story of insurance company evildoing has been neglectful to say the least, as exemplified by the fact that this was Potter's "first extended television interview since leaving the health insurance industry...last year." Encourage journalists to correct at least part of this by signing FAIR's petition to Tell Media: Include Single-Payer in Healthcare Debate.

Noticing how PBS's Gwen Ifill has a penchant for "filling her Washington Week program with journalists who almost invariably agree with each other instead of actually debating the issues of the week," critic Charles Kaiser decided to contact her (CJR.org, 5/8/09) about a recent "discussion of torture in which the only issue the panelists identified was how the Obama administration should deal with the political fallout from the demands for a full-scale investigation and/or prosecution of the officials responsible for American torture."

Kaiser's question of whether it would "ruin the discussion to have one person who believes that a full investigation of American torture and prosecutions of those responsible for it are the only way to rescue the honor of America" received a curt reply from Ifill: "Opinion? You were watching the wrong program if that's what you were looking for."

Aside from its snide tone, Kaiser spells out for Ifill exactly what's wrong with this view:

Gwen,

Everyone at that table obviously believed that investigating and/or prosecuting torture was a political problem for the Obama administration, and nothing more.

That is an opinion, Gwen. The fact that all of you shared it doesn't make it anything else. It does mean you were incapable of acknowledging any other point of view.

This is why we call it "the Washington bubble."

To top it off, after Ifill's subsequent offer to "feel free to call me during working hours. You know how," Kaiser reports that "after three more e-mail requests for an interview, and four voicemails left for Ifill and her two producers over two weeks, the anchorwoman never managed to return any of our phone calls."

New York Times editorialist Lawrence Downes (5/4/09) has some good questions about Pete Seeger's big 90th birthday party. The broadcast surely is bound to "be a PBS special made in pledge-week heaven," but Downes has to "wonder, though, how many of the angry moments will survive":

Will we hear the Native American musicians pleading for support in their battle with Peabody Energy? Peabody is a giant strip-mining company that has been at the center of lawsuits by Southwestern tribes over drinking water and income from mineral rights.

Will we hear the praise for the Clean Water Act of 1972, or the acid remark from one of the Indians: "Ever since that man by the name of Hudson went up that river, it's gone to hell."

The evening was, after all, a benefit for Clearwater, the name of an organization and a boat, both built by Mr. Seeger, that have fought for decades to rescue the Hudson River from life as an industrial sewer. The job isn’t done. Remember PCBs? General Electric dumped tons of them in the river. The company is about ready to dredge them out, but for now they are still there, seeping downriver and into fish.

Some insight into the priorities likely to hold sway in PBS's editing process may be gleaned from the "public" network's long-standing close relationship with at least one major sponsor... General Electric.

A recent Frontline documentary (3/31/09) presented mandatory for-profit healthcare as the only alternative to the current U.S. healthcare system, suggesting that this was the system all other developed nations use--even though the documentary was a sequel to an earlier Frontline report (4/15/08) that examined a wide range of international options, including Taiwan's single-payer model.

If you'd like to ask Frontline why it distorted the healthcare policy options, you can take part in FAIR's Action Alert here.  And you can leave copies of letters you send to Frontline in the comments of this post.

Neurologist Robert Burton warns Salon readers (3/12/09, ad-viewing required) of PBS's latest infomercial. "By airing another self-help show disguised as medical science--the dubious UltraMind Solution--the public network continues to undermine its credibility," Burton writes:

In May I reported that PBS stations were airing medical programs that weren't adequately reviewed or vetted by either the local station or parent PBS corporation. My concern was that publicly funded stations were broadcasting questionable medical claims, made by Daniel Amen, M.D., about unproven methods for the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's disease, without properly warning viewers the information was controversial. I suggested that, at the very least, the stations should present a clearly visible banner or disclaimer that the program doesn't represent the views of the local station or PBS....

Unfortunately, nearly a year has passed and nothing has changed. Last week, I turned to my local PBS station, KQED, and ran headlong into yet another program of medical self-promotion. Mark Hyman, M.D., a family physician, was talking about "brain fog" and "broken minds" and how such "conditions" could be cured or prevented by using "The UltraMind Solution"--a combination of books, DVDs and home questionnaires.

Hyman's truly insane claim that "diseases don't exist" spurs Burton to exclaim that airing such "dubious science" serves to "demean viewers' reasons for watching public television. Apparently PBS's mission is to raise money by exploiting viewers' gullibility at the expense of trustworthy programming. If so, it has achieved its goal--and undermined the central reason for having educational TV in the first place."

Calling a PBS NewsHour budget plan segment by Judy Woodruff "a primer on how to conduct an interview relying almost solely on Republican talking points," Brad Jacobson (Media Bloodhound, 2/27/09) says her "first question isn't necessarily a Republican talking point, but it might as well be": "$3.66 trillion, is that a number you can actually grasp?"

Seriously, members of the mainstream media need to stop acting like they suddenly have the vapors over big government spending. The Republicans weren't the only ones to preside over the most reckless spending in our government's history over the last eight years, on a war of choice and tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans in an environment of profligate deregulation and zero investment in infrastructure and our citizens' future. Mainstream news outlets and their anchors and talking heads watched it all unfold while expressing little or no concern at the time.

Woodruff's second question is like a GOP talking-point smorgasbord.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, just two of the terms I heard applied to it today were, No. 1, "radical," and the other one was "taking from the rich to give to the poor." Is this about redistributing wealth in this country?

I guess she couldn't fit "socialist" in there.

Relating how "Woodruff's line of questioning, one GOP economic meme after another, continues nearly unabated throughout the remainder of the interview," Jacobson thinks she's continuing the Jim Lehrer tradition of "giving the often false NewsHour impression that the quality of an interview is due to its length instead of its depth." Despite this unusual for big radio length, Jacobson dares you to "guess how many times she poses a question citing a criticism of an actual economist rather than a Republican?" His tally: "Zero."

No newcomer to the journalist-as-Republican-shill model, read of Woodruff's antics during the last presidential election cycle in this FAIR Press Release: "GOP Rhetoric on Kerry's Voting Record Goes Unchallenged" (3/8/04)

Yesterday the New York Times reported on the status of a new PBS news program Worldfocus. Amidst budget cuts at the New York station where it originates, the program has received some unusual financial support--a $1 million grant from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. What does the funder expect to get out of it? The Times reported that

the foundation expected Worldfocus to produce reports examining how other countries have dealt with the challenges facing the United States, like healthcare and Social Security reform.

The head of the foundation, David Walker, added that the show will maintain "total control over the content."
That's pretty standard language; what the Times should have explained is that the Peterson Foundation has for years specialized in scare-mongering over the future of Social Security and warning against the perils of deficit spending.

Thus, the public broadcaster is taking funds to cover a set of issues from an institution that spends its money advocating a specific political agenda on those issues. Is this OK at PBS? The answer would seem to be yes; over the years FAIR has documented the network's conflict-of-interest double standard.