Ruth: Forget Morning Edition and focus on The Diane Rehm Show. Tuesday's show was a topic the community will be interested in:
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
The chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has reopened debates about bias and balance in public television and radio programming. Diane and her guests look at the latest questions
Guests
Paul Farhi, reporter, The Washington Post
Stephen Labatan, reporter, New York Times
Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press
Diane Rehm addressed the issue that everyone is speaking of. Members who felt PBS or NPR was under attack and would not defend themselves might want to listen to this show. Diane was addressing the topic and had invited members of the CPB board to appear though they declined.
Among the points being made was that 90% of the monies provided by the government goes to TV (PBS) and only 10% goes to radio (NPR).
On the issue of where does the money go, I was most interested to learn that CPB was willing to hand over a $5 million dollar grant to Paul Gigot (Wall St. Journal) for his show. One of the "larger grants," it was noted and I'd question why so much was needed for a talking heads show.
The guest from The Washington Post noted that Bill Moyers was perceived as "anti-corporate which becomes avery interesting issue in terms of funding for PBS, PBS gets a lot of money from corporations to underwrite programming . . . By being so anti-corporate or being perceived as anti-corporate it's a somewhat self-defeating . . ." As many members noted, PBS is supposed to serve the public but very often comes off like it is serving corporations.
I would encourage community members to listen to this episode of Diane's show. I'd also suggest that the Morning Edition anchors do so as well because whether it's a name or a concept, when it comes up, Diane always asks her guests to explain. Morning Edition anchors would serve listeners better by doing the same when Cokie Roberts starts tossing out concepts and names that may be unfamiliar to the listeners.
