PBS

PBS (Public Broadcasting System) is a television network funded by viewers and the U.S. government, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

Conservative Commentary
Praising his "lively wit" while calling him "insightful and politically savvy", the CPB has hired conservative commentator Tucker Carlson for his own half hour show, Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered. Meanwhile, PBS has no comparable liberal commentary show. Shows featuring conservatives Paul Gigot and Lynne Cheney are also reportedly in the works.

Meanwhile, the CPB reportedly demanded that Bill Moyers be taken off the air for saying that the Republican's "agenda includes the power of the state to force pregnant women to surrender control over their own lives. It includes using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich. It includes giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment and control the regulatory agencies meant to hold them accountable. And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine."

Eric Alterman, writing in The Nation described PBS's embrace of the right as testimony to the success of the strategy of branding the organisation as left-wing. "The far right's decades-long campaign to falsely brand PBS a leftist conspiracy - one that apparently included giving shows to such commies as William F. Buckley, Jr., Louis Rukeyser, Ben Wattenberg and Fortune magazine - has really hit pay dirt this year, first in creating a show around CNN's conservative talking head Tucker Carlson, and now, far more egregiously, in creating a program for the extremist editorial board of the Wall Street Journal," he wrote.

Funding and Politics
PBS is routinely threatened with significant budget cuts by the U.S. Congress, as part of the ideological attacks described above. In June 2006, the trade publication O'Dwyer's PR Daily reported that PBS had hired "the well-connected Republican shop" of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers, to avoid a 23 percent budget cut approved by House subcommittee on a Republican party-line vote.

The BG&R lobbyists working on the PBS account are "Bryan Cunningham, a former aide to Nevada Sen. John Ensign and chief staff member on the Republican High Tech Task Force; Jennifer Larkin, a staffer to ex-California Rep. and Rush Limbaugh guest host Bob Dornan, and Bill Viney, who has experience in Republican politics in Wisconsin," according to O'Dwyer's.

For the financial year 2010, the PBS will receive a one-time $25 million appropriation from Congress. Additionally, funding for FY2010 increased $42.7 million, an increase of 8%, over 2009 levels.

Corporate Funding for Programs
The following corporations have funded PBS programs:
 * Exxon Mobil
 * Liberty Mutual
 * Suburu
 * Canon Inc.
 * Chevron
 * Bank of America Corp.
 * Intel
 * Monsanto
 * Toyota
 * Merrill Lynch
 * General Motors Corporation
 * Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad
 * GlaxoSmithKline
 * BP
 * Merck
 * Pfizer Inc
 * Siemens AG
 * Dow Chemical Company
 * McDonald's
 * Columbia Forest Products

Criticism from the Left

 * Anna McCarthy, The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America (The New Press, 2010).

Contact details
Web: http://www.pbs.org

Related SourceWatch articles

 * Barbour, Griffith and Rogers
 * Broadcasting Board of Governors
 * Corporation for Public Broadcasting
 * Robert G. Ottenhoff
 * Newton N. Minow - Former Chair
 * Colin G. Campbell - Former Chair
 * Badi Foster - board member