I Wish Randi Rhodes Would Quit Pimping For " News Hour "

Yesterday & today she's going on and on about the only place to get decent news was Jim Lerher PBS.

Beg to differ - as we all know PBS was just as slanted prior to invasion as the rest of MSM. More guests were pro-war vs non-war (22-106) Like MSM - the guests are 75% more likely to be former government officials or military experts.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=19&media_outlet_id=16

Democracy Now is available pretty much everywhere - BBC is on PBS stations and cable.

I stopped watching News Hour, it became unbearable and who could forget Jim Lerher's performance in debates 2002 / 2004?

While News Hour is a tad better than MSM, I wouldn't call it the best.

but Gwen Ifill is a quintessential media whore, and
her jibes against Democrats on Washington Week are
craven and disgusting.

The tone of utter disdain whenever she mentioned Clinton or Gore's name was palpable.

When Bush was selected in 2000 she was as giddy as a schoolgirl who had just been asked out by the football hero at her lunch table. It was smiles and smiles and smiles for weeks on end.

When PBS changed I realized that the whole rotten lot of American media had swung to the right, and all of the shallow greed and sanctimony that went with it. NewsHour is just more low-key than the others, but they've grown very comfortable being where they are.

was a warrior. He had his facts, and he was full of
righteous indignation that he shared very expertly.

This is why I can't close the book on TNH just yet.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/international/jan-june05/wolfowitz_3-16.html

JOHN CAVANAGH: It's a terrible choice; on a scale of one to ten I would give it a minus ten. If the Bush administration had wanted to poke in the eye every country on earth with this nomination, they would have picked Paul Wolfowitz. He is almost universally despised around the world, both in capitals and among ordinary people, as the architect of Bush's war in Iraq, a war which most people see as illegal, immoral and ineffective.

So he's hated for that. He's in some ways better known around the world than he is in the United States. And on top of that, he knows next to nothing about the mission of the organization he will head, the World Bank. It is an organization which now is supposed to be focused on reducing poverty. Paul Wolfowitz's only credential in this respect is, as mentioned, former ambassador to Indonesia, where he brags his greatest achievement was protecting the property rights of large U.S. corporations. That may have been good for Disney and Nike; it certainly wasn't so good for the poor people of Indonesia.

that they even had the guy on. As soon as he uttered his opening phrase "It's a terrible choice; on a scale of one to ten I would give it a minus ten." my first thought right at that moment was 'I bet this is the last time I'll ever see this guy on TV.' He was straight-talking about things that none of the NewsHour cast would even dare POSE A QUESTION about.

But it's not the guests that I have a problem with, it is the NewsHour people themselves. They are cowed beyond journalistic recognition. They have no sense that they are there to do anything more than let both sides say what they want. If one side is pure dissembling propaganda, then that's fine. There is no pursuit of truth. If you want to say that private accounts will help make Social Security solvent, when it will do exactly the opposite in any number of ways, then that's pretty much fine by them. They'll even pose it as a truth to be refuted by Democrats, when they are supposed to be the first line of defense slapping down blatant propaganda before someone else even has to address it.

You wouldn't believe it, but Margaret Warner used to be tough and discerning. Yes, the same Maggie Warner from NewsHour.

Jim Lehrer used to be cynical and contentious of Clinton policy advocates. Now he's like a kid who gets to ask Republicans a polite question if he promises to behave.

Mark Shields feels the constant need to impugn Democrats in order to set up his 'even-handed' bona fides before he segues into any criticism of Republican actions, forever looking over sheepishly towards Paul Gigot and now David Brooks as he's talking, to see if he's OK in speaking anything negative about those Republican actions.

It's a polite charade of political journalism. Right now I'm watching for the first time Paul Gigot's 'Wall Street Journal Roundable' with commentary like how Republicans passed the bankruptcy bill 'so that affluent people can't walk away from their debt'. It's unreal.

in the world of political discussion on television.
I'll take it over Fox, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS -- any of
them, any day.

I think Joe Wilson crystallized the propoganda point
best when he talked about how "fairness" in journalism
now is when Bush said the earth is flat at the headline
reads Dems dispute Earth's flatness. Or something like that.

I have to disagree a little bit about Shields. Shields
gets his licks in and puts Brooks back on his heels a good
deal of the time.

Don't even get me started though on the wastes of air
that are Washington Week and McLaughlin Group. (I have not
seen the Tucker Carlson show this year in this market.
Thank. You. Gawd.)

for virtually all of his on-air commentary:

'Well David, I'm not saying that Democrats don't lie, cheat and steal from their blind grandmother if they think they can get away with it, but let's be serious here - Republicans aren't being 100% honest when they say <insert meandering criticism of Republican actions here>. I mean come on, that's not exactly playing strictly by the rules either.'

He starts by hitting Dems on the back of the head with a blackjack, blusters sheepishly while looking over at Gigot or Brooks to make sure he's not giving any offense with his criticism, and finally summarizes with a mildly sardonic rebuke that rhetorically minimizes whatever political right-wing depravity he is addressing. All the while somehow making it sound like he needs permission just to criticize Republicans, and sounding like a whiner the whole time he does.

He was supposedly a Marine, but all I see is a man striving at all times to be inoffensive to Republicans and ready to accept any criticism of Democrats. Whoever his counterpart is, within a few months Shields has taken on the role of subservient intellect, deferential to that counterpart's righteous superiority. I can't wait until that mindless twerp Rich Lowry takes over from Brooks. Watching Shields, the ex-Marine, prostrate himself into the pleading, mumble-mouth, second-class pundit to Lowry, like he's done to every right-wing counterpart he's had so far, ought to be an amazing sight to see. The nearly retarded Lowry will start out deferential to the revered old hand, and within a few short months Shields will be effectively domineered by him by his own sense of political inferiority.

Let's not forget, this is the guy that called Bush's post-911 presidency "magnificent" and compared him to Winston Churchill. He's almost as bad as Alan Colmes. Except he's on PBS and doesn't have an obnoxious loudmouth to cow him. He does it to himself, and to Democrats at large.

I'm not saying I don't wish he were more harsh
sometimes, but despite sometimes following the
pattern you describe, he does come up with some
good stuff.

Like this, from last week. I don't think there
is anything wrong with using criticism from a
Republican to attack another Republican. It's a
rhetorical technique, and a powerful one.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/political_wrap/jan-june05/sb_3-11.html

MARK SHIELDS: Jim, what's been most amazing to me is that the whole aura of genius that absolutely sort of encompassed the White House after the president's reelection victory and the Republicans' victory in the House and the Senate -- all of a sudden is subject to second guessing, doubt, criticism, open skepticism from Republican office holders. And they're going very public on it. And it is... I mean, Lindsay Graham, probably… who's been a strong supporter of the president --

JIM LEHRER: …senator from South Carolina.

MARK SHIELDS: South Carolina… put it very bluntly - said, hey, the sideshow, personal accounts, were always a sideshow and they became the main event. The main event had to be, which the administration did not emphasize in the judgment of many of its own supporters adequately, is to save and strengthen Social Security. The problem is saving and strengthening Social Security is not a plausible or believable mission for a conservative administration any more than a liberal administration says "we want to save and strengthen the anti-ballistic missile system, Star Wars."

So as a consequence, personal accounts, which had the greatest appeal to George Bush's most conservative, tax cutting, free market people became the centerpiece and I think it's... they're paying a serious price for it because the intensity of the opposition is there and it's especially among older voters.

night she was saying the Newshour was probably covering the new budget in great detail,I looked and they were covering steroid nonsense for 1st half hour at least.She was saying noone owns PBS but us;so what are all those corporate commercials before every show?The only political show they have that's not whoreville is NOW and they've cut that to a half hour and filled the other half with Tucker Carlson.I looked at the Newshour website,no segment all week was about budget, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/newshour_index.html

Starting a few years ago, whenever they had a Democrat on they would take pains to point out that it was merely a response to a Republican that they'd had on an earlier show, or how they were going to have a Republican on in an upcoming show.

That kind of thing, plus their now completely pathological fear of asking hard questions of any Republicans. The questions to them are always 'tell us what you think' or 'what do you say to that' mush. They rarely follow up and never get even slightly contentious with even the most brazen right-wing propaganda.

PBS NewsHour has become just horribly bland and non-incisive out of utter fear of irking Republicans. Just watch Lapdog Lehrer whenever Rumsfeld is on. I keep hoping Rummy will take out a rolled-up newspaper and smash Lehrer in the snout. At least it would convey one true thing to the viewers.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

I no longer watch or contribute to PBS.

I also wondered too if she actually watched it enough to know they aren't exactly "fair and balanced" either.

And no newsource is unbiased right now.