If NPR wanted to establish that they’re not liberals, they probably wouldn’t send out radical left-wing ranters like Bill Moyers on their behalf. At Salon.com and at The Huffington Post, Moyers (and Michael Winship) drag out all the rhetoric about how conservatives are unloading another “fierce and often unscrupulous” attack, seeking “to extinguish the independent reporting and analysis they find so threatening to their phobic worldview.”
Just as public radio struggles against yet another assault from its long-time nemesis -- the right-wing machine that would thrill if our sole sources of information were Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and ads paid for by the Koch Brothers -- it walks into a trap perpetrated by one of the sleaziest operatives ever to climb out of a sewer.
Which part of this paragraph is sillier? Moyers ranting about the Koch brothers donating to Tea Party groups, when his Schumann Center is a sugar daddy for leftish media outlets? Or Moyers suggesting that defunding NPR would somehow silence the entire liberal media, as if every other national media outlet were just “independent reporters” too. But that’s just the way Moyers writes, like a direct-mail fundraiser, where the world’s end is just around the corner:
But for all its flaws, consider an America without public media. Consider a society where the distortions and dissembling would go unchallenged, where fact-based reporting is eliminated, and where the field is abandoned to the likes of James O'Keefe, whose "journalism" relies on lying and deceit.
We established yesterday that this kind of undercover “lying and deceit” was just performed by NPR’s own reporters, hunting for “Islamophobia.” It's not sleazy sewer stuff when the NPR reporter on loan from the ACLU does it.
Moyers also reflexively recalled with relish how Nixon tried to curtail public broadcasting after his boss Lyndon Johnson had it installed. He loved how PBS and NPR worked to impeach Nixon. That will teach you to oppose our funding. And then came the next wave of conservatives, and the next:
Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich tried to gut public broadcasting, too, and the George W. Bush White House planted partisan operatives at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in an attempt to challenge journalists who didn't hew to the party line.
As if there were never partisan operatives in public broadcasting, starting with Bill “LBJ” Moyers. NPR’s been headed over the last few decades by Democrats like former George McGovern campaign manager Frank Mankiewicz and former Marion Barry aide Delano Lewis. Douglas Bennet directed the Agency for International Development for Jimmy Carter and after heading NPR for ten years, served as an assistant secretary of state for Bill Clinton.
Adam Clayton Powell III, son of a Democratic congressman, was a vice president for news. Bob Ferrante, executive producer of NPR's morning news, helped handle Democratic National Committee public relations from 1986 to 1988.
Moyers also claimed that Ron Schiller was merely a fundraiser, not a news man. NPR’s news product is unimpeachable:
If you would see how this integrity is upheld, go to the NPR website and pull up any of its reporting since 2009 on the Tea Party movement. Read the transcripts or listen to its coverage -- you will find it impartial and professional, a full representation of various points of view, pro and con.
That’s not hard to question. Take their reliance on New York Times reporter Kate Zernike, who insisted the Tea Party has “a lot of people in the movement who are brought out by frustration, who are socially conservative, who do want to talk about President Obama's birth certificate.”
This wouldn’t be a left-wing screed without an attack on Fox News, “pumping arsenic into democracy’s drinking water.” That’s how leftists like Moyers characterize conservatives getting a chance to speak on television. They certainly weren’t welcome on the last program Moyers hosted. Moyers finds it unfair that Ron Schiller was axed, but Roger Ailes still runs Fox after describing NPR as Nazis after they fired Juan Williams:
When the Anti-Defamation League objected to the characterization, Ailes apologized but then described NPR as "nasty, inflexible" bigots.
Double standard? You bet. A fundraiser for NPR is axed for his own personal bias and unprofessionalism but Ailes gets away scot free, still running a news division that is constantly pumping arsenic into democracy's drinking water while he slanders public radio as equal to the monsters and murderers of the Third Reich.
This, from the man who blamed conservative "hate radio" for the Oklahoma City bombing.
