The Public Broadcasting "Service" selected Paula Kerger from the mega-station WNET in New York to be their new president yesterday. Liberal AP media reporter Frazier Moore, a fan of "truth-telling" Bill Moyers, excluded any conservative reaction, but listed the fight over liberal bias to be among Kerger's challenges. She's ready to fight, not switch, to keep the liberal bias:
Success, she said, depends on "the ability to get the staff at PBS as well as the (station) leaders across the country to stand together. If I felt I couldn't do that, I wouldn't have taken the job."
But Jeff Chester, executive director of the [liberal] Center for Digital Democracy, proposed his own formula for success.
"On the one hand, she has to stay strong to her principles, and resist pressure from conservative critics. But she also has to appeal to those critics to get them to support a blueprint for the future.
"In order for her to succeed, I think she needs to ruffle some feathers -- and not just hide behind Big Bird."
On the feather-ruffling thing, Kerger landed right where the PBS brass landed in the controversy over putting two lesbian moms on the kids' show "Postcards With Buster," just where you'd expect a New York City exec to land: children living with gays "deserve to have their lives and their reality acknowledged and reflected in a series that celebrates diversity."
That "blueprint for the future" the liberals are always gabbing about is finding a way, through an endowment of some sort, to remove conservative congressmen from any role in advising PBS on its programming. They want the federal dollars pouring into PBS with no oversight whatsoever. A good conservative will not favor that scheme in any way.
