The House just voted to entirely defund NPR:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2011/roll192.xml
It was 229-196, or something like that.
Probably the senate will never allow it to come to a vote, and if it does, the president will veto the bill.
The secular humanists and Marxists love a biased archipelago of stations reporting the news entirely their way from coast to coast. Who wouldn't? So of course they voted to keep NPR en masse.
I rather like NPR when I get to listen to it, except when they report politics. Then it's like the Marxist hooligans have censored every truth, and replaced it with what Orwell called The Ministry of Truth. Last night I listened to a program about some Maoist group in India which had taken up an armed struggle with the Indian government. For a half hour this program went on without even once consulting the Indian government. I was somewhat shocked at the bias, to say the least. This is virtually the only news station to go this far to the left, and yet they have government funding, which Obama and the Democrats completely endorse.
NPR gets away with murder in terms of unfair and unbalanced representation. They did try to have a few moderate voices on, but then when they defenestrated Juan Williams, you had to wonder if these shenanigans would continue. Williams was one of their only "people of color" and also their only independent. Williams is a weird egg: he likes Obama, but sometimes argues with his decisions. He has his own mind. That simply won't do at NPR. Williams' big crime was to say that he was afraid on airplanes when he saw turbans or other Arab garb getting on. Under PC, you have to go bravely to your death, loving and supporting all the wonderful peoples around the world who hate our guts and want us to die. Because of course you can dialogue with OBL and his ilk! Just ask Daniel Pearl! Just ask the women of Afghanistan who lived there under the Taliban!
We'll see what happens with NPR. Obama would veto anything that threatened his base. NPR is solidly in his corner. He tried to save ACORN, but couldn't. Now another of his props is in danger. I assume he will fight even harder to save NPR.
What worries me is that the universities will be next: Obama's last prop. For decades they've slid further and further left, and now even to be a classical liberal is to be hated. You have to be a Marxist sociopath to get a position in any of the larger colleges or universities. You have to want to silence the other, in the name of diversity. Having a total monopoly on all thought IS the new diversity, just as under the communism regimes the first thing they did was to rename exile. Reeducation meant electric shock for days before being disappeared to Siberia.
Is it wrong to do this with federally funded institutions? Uh, yes.
All it's going to take is a Republican president, and the legislature back in the hands of the Republicans (Trump just threw his hat in the ring) and the whole house of cards supporting the Marxist jokers is coming down: all funding for the leftists will be gone. This means the universities and PBS and NPR will have to make their own funding. Plus, they will be paying taxes, in addition to no longer having funding. Is there still time to turn this around?
I have felt it coming for decades, but since the left has committed intellectual genocide against political diversity on campuses as well as public TV, the same thing is likely to happen there as has happened at NPR. Why should centrists and conservatives pay the tax bill to support 600,000 Ward Churchills who are seemingly hell-bent on America's destruction, with "a thousand Mogadishus" as their mantra? Why should we let our lacrosse players be lynched by Marxist professors who assume guilt on the part of their students without even the benefit of a trial?
My own representative, Chris Gibson, was one of nine Repubs who voted to maintain NPR funding. I am not sure why he did this. He's a good egg, I think. NPR does have value. The universities do have value. We're not all weirdos. Some of us are trying to present a balanced perspective, and still hold to classical liberal values as presented by F. Hayek, Locke, and Smith (throw out the Keynes).
This country needs all the news it can get, but it needs it from more diverse sources. We don't need groupthink. We need conversations between groups, not just horrific propaganda from Maoist jungle guerillas operating in the mountains of India, or psychobabble from NPR execs following stinging dismissals of centrists and independents, (the defenestration of centrists like Juan Williams, who was one of the only sane voices at NPR).
Let us have the perspectives of all Americans, including those good people of the Tea Party (economic conservatives, not racists!). If NPR is truly a NATIONAL and PUBLIC radio, then let it represent the NATION, and the entire PUBLIC. Let's listen fairly to one another, and listen with our hearts, and not be so sickeningly one-sided.
Otherwise, propagandize with your own dime on your own time.
6 comments:
The one question I have is this:
Why would the Republican congress, (especially knowing full well that this is a symbolic vote because it'll never pass the senate) call an emergency session of congress to ram this thing down America's throats during a time of major upheaval around the world?
Where are the Republican's priorities?
This is one of many of the current House's actions that prove that the Republican party in the house is more concerned with partisan theatre than doing important things for the country.
So it goes.
As everyone knows, the progress of the media in this country has been steadily towards consolidation, decay, and dumbing down. Newspapers have been on their way out for decades, and radio and television news services have seen round after round of downsizing. There's an homogenization of viewpoint taking place everywhere in the media, and people either don't seem to notice, or don't care.
Radio and TV pressured traditional print media, while cable killed the big three broadcasting services. Up popped CNN, and later FOX. NPR has been starved, just like the other major networks, and its programming has been severely curtailed, at least in our neck of the woods. It's become very difficult to support an independent information and opinion news division.
It was never FOX versus PBS & NPR. If you have Cable, you can see a lot of different kinds of information programming. FOX's news is deliberately biased, and unashamed to be so. No pretense of being "balanced"--they simply take out their side-arms and blast away at their enemies.
Nothing wrong with that, of course. But to pose as an information source is wrong. If you listen consistently to NPR, you know they really don't do a lot of "opinion" reporting--it's mostly just stories they get from the wire services, like everyone else. If you watch The News Hours on PBS, you'll generally see them bend over backwards to get in every conservative position they can find. They don't stand them up like cardboard targets and shoot holes in them, they let them do their worst with free time.
FOX Sunday with Chris Wallace is kind of a joke. Maura Liason and Juan Williams are the crash dummies for smirking Bill Krystal and pompous Brit Hume. Wallace and his henchmen are clearly "in league" against the "opposition"--one doesn't learn anything here, except how radical the gunslingers can show themselves to be.
NPR is an enormous priority to the Republicans because of the way they monopolize radio stations, using Federal Funding to push biased programming.
This is a major domestic problem from coast to coast.
Fox is far better in how they allow people even from the very far left on their programs. There is a guy from Temple who is now from Columbia U. who is an actual Marxist who is always on Fox talking with O'Reilly. He often gets to speak ten minutes or so per program when he's on.
I can't recall his name.
There are some shows I don't watch on Fox. I can't bear Hannity, even though I am largely in agreement with his viewpoint. He muffles and shouts over his guests, which I find uncomfortably obnoxious. O'Reilly doesn't do this.
I try to watch Maddow on MsNBC. She's on all night as if it's Castro's Cuba, and she just talks and talks and talks, and rarely lets in other viewpoints.
Occasionally she allows in another viewpoint, but she seems almost hysterical when she listens.
I like O'Reilly because he's so calm and balanced.
I also like Greta Van Susteren although her programs are often devoted to missing people. I find this focus in her programs (she spent a year on Natalie Holloway) to be over the top with terrible emotions. I couldn't stand seeing Natalie's parents in that terrible situation.
Geraldo goes around the world and tries to get the news. He's rather interesting especially if it's in Spanish-speaking places.
The left media is far more unfair than Fox, but you have to be in the middle or slightly to the right to pick up on it, I guess.
We need all the viewpoints represented. At present, only Fox even tries to get other viewpoints into its programming.
Did we make note of the 8th anniversary of Rachel Corrie's death? I think it's sad when a university's most notable former student will forever be a martyr to a cause. I couldn't help but notice that Benjamin Netanyahu's interview with Piers Whatshisname aired on the day after that anniversary. Twenty questions usually starts with determining whether the subject is animal, vegetable or mineral. Which category applies to Ariel Sharon?
Everybody edits for impact. Sarah Palin's interviews with Couric and Gibson were edited to implode her candidacy, and yet the whole videos were never seen anywhere, when they could easily be available online.
O'Keefe made his entire video available online.
You still seem to have a double-standard. (But I admit you are writing quite well, so keep it up, Buster Brown.)
"NPR is an enormous priority to the Republicans because of the way they monopolize radio stations, using Federal Funding to push biased programming."
What piffle.
monopolize radio stations? You mean have their own?
If I have my own sandwich, and there are thousands of sandwiches out there, would you say I am monopolizing sandwiches?
Silly.
And if you can show me an instance where Katie Couric pulled an O'Keefe (like when he recited that less-than-comfortable quote from the website and then edited Schiller saying 'oh really, that's what they said' right after it as a way to deceive the audience...if you give me something like that, then yes, I will condemn Couric. Will you condemn O'Keefe? Or are you really simply partisan?)
The thing is, I am totally willing to condemn partisan leftists when they edit things to lie.
This is why I keep coming back to Michael Moore - because I know instances where he did this, and I condemn them.
The Katie Couric stuff is slippery - If there's evidence that she edited things to deceive in a manner similar to O'Keefe, then yes, I will condemn her.
You have yet to show me this evidence.
AND.
You have yet to, in light of the clear evidence against O'Keefe, condemn him for what you accuse Couric of doing.
Where do you stand here?
I stand in a place where it's unethical to lie through editing.
And bad form to use edited-lies as evidence for making a point.
If Couric did this, I condemn Couric (again, no evidence have I seen to convince me of this...)
When Moore does this, I condemn Moore...
When O'Keefe does this, I condemn O'Keefe.
When Couric may have done this, you condemn Couric.
When O'Keefe does this, you Don't condemn O'Keefe.
See how you're the one with the double-standard?
I am over here, asking for evidence of lying-through-editing. You haven't provided it. Were you to do so, and that evidence were similar to what we saw from O'Keefe, then I would condemn those actions.
You, however, base your approach simply on whether the person agrees with your political viewpoint.
That's why we're calling shenanigans.
You can run your game with the rings too small for the bottle-tops, and keep pointing across to the basketball hoops and accusing them of doing the same, but that doesn't change the fact that A) we haven't inspected the basketball hoops, and B) your game is still rigs.
Shenanigans!!!
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