It's bad enough when our Public Broadcasting Service hails liberal presidents and trashes conservative ones. We've had PBS do adoring documentaries on dictators like Fidel Castro. Now California stations are running a documentary connected to communist China.
The hour-long film, which is entitled Voices From the Frontline: China’s War on Poverty, didn’t reveal its connection to the government when it discussed Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “poverty alleviation program.”
According to an article posted on Thursday by Chuck Ross, an investigative reporter with the Dally Caller website:
[California] PBS affiliates KOCE and KCET received more than $5.5 million combined in federal funding last year, according to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s records.
The film is written and directed by an American financier who has acknowledged having close ties to Chinese officials and who has touted Beijing’s coronavirus response.
The KOCE station, also known as PBS SoCal, “helped produce the film and premiered it Monday,” Ross noted, while “KCET -- which merged with KOCE in 2018 -- will air the show on Saturday.”
Other PBS affiliates, including those in Idaho and Las Vegas, have either already aired the film or plan to do so later this month.
“In the last 40 years, China’s economic development has lifted more than 700 people out of poverty by the end of the year,” reads the introductory script in the film. Meanwhile, the closing credits of the documentary show that it was produced by “The Kuhn Foundation and PBS SoCal in association with CGTN.”
Of course, Ross noted, “PBS and other publicly-funded news outlets like NPR have come under fire in recent years, with conservatives pushing to defund the organizations over a perceived liberal bias.” The investigative reporter added: “Other news outlets have come under scrutiny for publishing propaganda promoted by the Chinese government.”
As you probably expect, “President Donald Trump has proposed defunding” the CPB corporation, which “provides the federal dollars that go to PBS affiliates and NPR.” “PBS and its 350 affiliates are funded through a mixture of government grants, corporate sponsorships and private donations,” Ross added. “While federal funding makes up a small percentage of PBS affiliates’ revenue, the organization says that government money is crucial to its survival.”
Robert Lawrence Kuhn, a former investment banker, “appears to be highly regarded in China, though he is not as well known in the U.S.” He “has made appearances on channels like CNN and Bloomberg over the years to discuss issues in China, but appears frequently on Beijing-controlled news outlets” like CGTN, CCTV and the China Daily newspaper.
In an amazing statement on the coronavirus outbreak, Kuhn declared: “President Xi Jinping calls for fighting the outbreak in an open and transparent manner. ‘That’s the key: transparency, complete transparency.’” Ross added: “Kuhn’s view is not shared by health experts and government officials across the world who have blamed Chinese authorities for failing to contain the virus and for providing misleading information.”
