WELL THERE’S A REAL SQUARE CAT, HE LOOKS 1974: CBS Nudges Ken Burns Into Preposterous Claim PBS Isn’t Leftist, It Has ‘Firing Line.’
On Sunday’s Face the Nation, CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson interviewed Ultraliberal Ken about his new film on the American Revolution, but also supinely cued him up to make cockamamie arguments about PBS.
JOHN DICKERSON: Are you worried about the future of PBS?
KEN BURNS: Of course I am. And I’ve always been worried about it. In the 1990s, I think I testified in the House or the Senate, in appropriations or authorization about the endowments are about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a half dozen times.
JOHN DICKERSON: Make the case for PBS.
KEN BURNS: It is the Declaration of Independence applied to the communications world. It’s a bottom up. It’s the largest network in the country. There’s 330 stations. It mostly serves, and this is where the elimination of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is so shortsighted, it mainly serves rural areas in which the PBS signal may be the only they get. [???] They also have not only our good children’s and primetime stuff, they have Classroom of the Air continuing education, homeland security, crop reports, weather, emergency information. That we’re going to take away? This seems foolhardy and seems misguided, mainly because there is a perception among a handful of people that this is somehow a blue or a left wing thing when this is the place that for 32 years gave William F. Buckley a show. And it’s – I mean it’s – and it’s – that show is, by the way, is still going on and moderated by a conservative.
This is a preposterous argument. Firing Line was the conservative exception to the liberal rule. They used it for exactly this purpose: to distract people from the leftist programming every night. Firing Line often had liberals on it. Other shows on PBS didn’t have any balance. [The last new episode of WFB’s Firing Line aired in December of 1999 – Ed.] It’s especially lame for Burns to claim the ersatz new version of Firing Line is “moderated by a conservative” when Margaret Hoover sells herself as a gay-rights activist and her husband is John Avlon, the Democrat candidate that Ken Burns maxed out with campaign money.
But that’s not quite as embarrassing as suggesting the hayseeds in rural America have no channels except PBS, and no cable or streaming or cell phones or internet. What happened to “CBS fact-checking in real time”?
Burns and Dickerson are both reasonably intelligent guys. So why does their ideology require that they pretend that it’s still the 1970s, and not an era of innumerable Websites, news outlets and social media platforms, not to mention near-ubiquitous satellite dishes, cable TV, and satellite radio. Why is Ken Burns pretending that PBS “mainly serves rural areas in which the PBS signal may be the only [one] they get?”
And even back in the bad old days of mass media, there was a lot of television programming besides PBS. As Iowahawk jokes:
