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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAfter pledging transparency, PBS hides details of new deal with billionaire owner of NewsHour
Source: PandoDaily
Last month, in response to Pandos revelations that anti-pension mogul John Arnold secretly was financing PBSs Pension Peril series, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting issued a scathing report demanding immediate reform. Criticizing the lack of transparency at PBS, CPBs ombudsman Joel Kaplan declared that public broadcasting outlets must let the public access details of their financial dealings.
So hows that new commitment to transparency going?
Heres how: Once again, a PBS flagship station is in the process of negotiating a deal with a politically active mogul. Once again, the deal involves the NewsHour the same iconic PBS program that stealthily promoted Arnolds anti-pension programming. And once again, PBS is refusing to disclose the deals financial details to the public.
The major difference this time is that this new story of secrecy isnt about who funds the journalism on the NewsHour. It is about who actually owns the NewsHour.
Read more: http://pando.com/2014/03/07/after-pledging-transparency-pbs-hides-details-of-new-deal-with-billionaire-owner-of-newshour/
bvar22
(39,909 posts)Lot of that going around these days.
Catherina
(35,568 posts)blm
(113,063 posts)a propaganda outlet to push the global fascist agenda for the GOP?
The GOP's $3 Billion Propaganda Organ
http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2006/122706.html
By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
December 27, 2006
The American Right achieved its political dominance in Washington over the past quarter century with the help of more than $3 billion spent by Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon on a daily propaganda organ, the Washington Times, according to a 21-year veteran of the newspaper.
George Archibald, who describes himself as the first reporter hired at the Washington Times outside the founding group and author of a commemorative book on the Times first two decades, has now joined a long line of disillusioned conservative writers who departed and warned the public about extremism within the newspaper.
In an Internet essay on recent turmoil inside the Times, Archibald also confirmed claims by some former Moon insiders that the cult leader has continued to pour in $100 million a year or more to keep the newspaper afloat. Archibald put the price tag for the newspapers first 24 years at more than $3 billion of cash.
At the newspapers tenth anniversary, Moon announced that he had spent $1 billion on the Times or $100 million a year but newspaper officials and some Moon followers have since tried to low-ball Moons subsidies in public comments by claiming they had declined to about $35 million a year.
The figure from Archibald and other defectors from Moons operation is about three times higher than the $35 million annual figure.
The apparent goal of downplaying Moons subsidy has been to quiet concerns that Moon was funneling vast sums of illicit money into the United States to influence the American political process in ways favorable to right-wing leaders and possibly criminal cartels around the world.
Though best known as the founder of the Unification Church, Moon, now 86, has long worked with right-wing political forces linked to organized crime and international drug smuggling, including the Japanese yakuza gangs and South American cocaine traffickers.
Moon insiders, including his former daughter-in-law Nansook Hong, also have described Moons system for laundering cash into the United States and then funneling much of it into his businesses and influence-buying apparatus, led by the Washington Times.
The Times, in turn, has targeted American politicians of the center and left with journalistic attacks sometimes questioning their sanity, as happened with Democratic presidential nominees Michael Dukakis and Al Gore. Those themes then resonate through the broader right-wing echo chamber and into the mainstream media.
Washington Times articles are routinely cited by C-SPAN, for instance, without explanations to viewers that the newspaper is financed by an ultra-right religious cult leader, a convicted tax fraud and a publicly identified money-launderer. Most American listeners just think theyre getting straightforward news.
The Times also has led attacks on investigators who threatened to expose crimes committed by Republican and right-wing operatives. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Times targeted Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, who recounted in his memoir Firewall the importance of the Times in protecting the Reagan-Bush administrations legal flanks.
When journalistic and congressional investigations began uncovering evidence of drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contra rebels, the Washington Times counter-attacked, too, although in that case the Moon organization may have had a direct interest in containing the probes that could have exposed its relationship with South American drug lords.
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Pretzel_Warrior
(8,361 posts)not a private for profit corporation. Dave Sirota is going pretty good work as investigative journalist for Pando.