FAIR's 5/6 Counterspin was brilliant: CPB, SS, Venezuela -- hit all the...

...big ones this week.

Here's the link to listen to it: http://www.fair.org/audio/counterspin/050605.mp3 (they also have it in Real Audio)

And here's the summary:

Dean Baker on Social Security, Rory O'Connor on CPB

(5/6/05-5/12/05)

This week on CounterSpin: The debate over Social Security privatization will be heating up again now that George W. Bush is endorsing a specific proposal. Are the media sorting out the truth about Bush's push for so-called progressive indexation? Does the math really show that Bush is, as one New York Times column put it, Robin Hood? We'll get the details from Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Also on the show: The conservative cat seems to be further out of the bag at CPB. Now PBS president Pat Mitchell is being criticized in public by the new Republican head of the CPB, which gives PBS some $30 million a year. Ken Tomlinson says he was joking when he said public TV programming needed to reflect the Republican 'mandate.' Mitchell says it didn't sound like a joke to her. We'll hear from veteran public television producer and journalist Rory O'Connor about this ongoing story.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2510

Thanks for posting this AP. Counterspin is one I forget to keep up with and they are always good.

O'Connor has a post on his blog on this.

http://www.roryoconnor.org/blog/

Is Pat Mitchell the Martin Niemöller of public television? ...

There is definitely deafness at PBS headquarters, and has been for more than a decade – but not of tone or balance, Instead, PBS officials like Pat Mitchell are guilty of ignoring the deafening clamor of conservatives mounting an assault on public media of all types, and particularly public television. Right-wing activists began organizing their CPB “coup” long ago, but PBS officials such as Mitchell and her predecessors have done nothing but stand by silently. Led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and assisted by character assassins and political hit men like David Horowitz, they began by going after PTV’s equivalent of Niemoller’s “socialists, trade unionists and Jews.”

I know, because I was one of them.

Along with Bill Moyers, David Fanning and Frontline, my partner Danny Schechter and I were high on the original hit list. Our thought-crime? Producing the anti-apartheid newsmagazine program “South Africa Now,” which appeared weekly between 1988-1991 on more than 150 public television stations. Unlike the Wall Street Journal, our company Globalvision received no funding or distribution assistance from either CPB or PBS. And when Horowitz – then as now backed by the largesse of conservative funders – labeled us “hard-line Marxist propagandists” and “advocates, not journalists” in major metropolitan newspapers, few within the public television hierarchy said a word. The same proved true when Horowitz later met secretly with top officials at the Los Angeles public television station KCET, which abruptly pulled our series off the air without even talking to us.

______


O'Connor wrote about what appears to me to be a huge national security issue. Doesn't appear it will covered in the TV news, tho.

http://www.roryoconnor.org/blog/wp-print.php?p=119