Note: I have no idea why this post keeps changing form, duplicating paragraphs, breaking lines, etc. after I fix those. It's a new one on me.
Back when I still had a TV, I'd stopped watching PBS news programming because it was more consistent a vehicle of the Republican "moderate" bullshit than some of the commercial networks, though I didn't much watch those either. I'd stopped trusting "non-commercial" media, PBS, NPR, C-Span pretty much entirely. So I didn't listen to their coverage of the "debate" last night until reading hints for what that was like at RMJ's and other places online. I went back and listened to the post-"debate" coverage, Judy Woodruff, Yamiche Alcindor, Lisa Desjardins, Amy Walter, Gary Abernathy, Cynthia Tucker, all tisk-tisked the candidates in a safe, useless,"both sides" "analysis" of what happened as Trump called out a violent hate group to "stand by" as the Republicans prepare to use a more extreme form of voter intimidation, of the kind that William Rehnquist used to engage in to prevent the votes of People of Color, when he was a genteel Republican thug instead of a "justice".
By the time the
PBS News Hour Senior National Correspondent Amnar Narwaz unsurprisingly
announced that their panel of six, count 'em six whole evenly divided
undecided but "leaning" voters had been horrified in exactly the same
way by the incivility "on both sides" that the entire useless PBS
exercise had been, anyone who had a working mind would have turned it
off like I turned off PBS back when it was McNeil-Lehrer doing the same
Republican thug enabling act.
I hope one of the things done in
the next congress is the total defunding of PBS and NPR. If there is
one thing I've learned since those innocent days back when we all longed
for a BBC style public broadcasting system in the United States, a
real, independent news reporting organization that upheld standards of
journalism free from the ideological and financial interests of the
corporations and their owners, is that you can't trust anything like
that to not become what it was allegedly created to be different from.
The BBC has been as much of a disappointment in that as PBS and NPR
have been here, they have consistently used the same kinds of tactics to
shore up support for Boris Johnson, their criminal clown even as he has
been a total disaster of the Trumpian kind.
They are useless, they should not be funded, they should be defunded by the chumps who still donate to them. en I still had a TV, I'd stopped watching PBS news programming because it was more consistent a vehicle of the Republican "moderate" bullshit than some of the commercial networks, though I didn't much watch those either. I'd stopped trusting "non-commercial" media, PBS, NPR, C-Span pretty much entirely. So I didn't listen to their coverage of the "debate" last night until reading hints for what that was like at RMJ's and other places. I went back and listened to the post-"debate" coverage, Judy Woodruff, Yamiche Alcindor, Lisa Desjardins, Amy Walter, Gary Abernathy, Cynthia Tucker, all tisk-tisked the candidates in a safe, useless,"both sides" "analysis" of what happened as Trump called out a violent hate group to "stand by" as the Republicans prepare to use a more extreme form of voter intimdation, of the kind that William Rehnquist used to engage in to intimdate voters of color with, when he was a genteel Republican thug instead of a "justice". By the time the PBS News Hour Senior National Correspondent Amnar Narwaz unsurprisingly announced that their panel of six, count 'em six whole evenly divided undecided but "leaning" voters had been horrified in exactly the same way by the incivility "on both sides" that the entire useless PBS exercise had been, anyone who had a working mind would have turned it off like I turned off PBS back when it was McNeil-Lehrer doing the same Republican thug enabling act.
That dream is just one of many of the mostly white, secular liberal liberalism of the 1960-70s has died because it had no moral purpose, "evening the playing field" style amoral, "disinterested" stuff that immediately gives in to the side that lies and ramps up racism, etc. immediately gives them the upper hand. That was so obvious in the Woodruff et al's reaction to what they'd just heard as Trump, given the chance by a FOX figure to reject American-fascism, "white supremacy" called on the violent fascists to "stand by" and could just tisk-tisk the unpleasant-makingness of it all.
They are useless, they should not be funded, they should be defunded by the chumps who still donate to them. I'd rather that whole fraud of "evenhanded" "objectivity" was dumped. It doesn't exist. Journalism that doesn't consistently choose to promote morality out of some insipid "secularism" inevitably ends up serving which ever thugs and gangsters have the more money or can say the meanest things about them. They are as cowardly as the PBS gang was last night.
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