For obvious reasons, the Left is typically very supportive of public broadcasting, since it's overwhelmingly liberal in its personnel and its political content. But Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, so far to the left that the average American liberal looks awfully conservative, is announcing a radical new solution: defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Why? Because the "corrupt" CPB board's idea that they should actually challenge PBS and NPR to attempt balanced news "compromises the independence" of pubcasters.
Oh, FAIR isn't calling for defunding public broadcasting. On the contrary, their pet idea is to RAISE taxes to provide an "independent" stream of taxpayer revenue. PBS types have tried to create legislative support for a massive endowment in the same vein. The key here is that the left wants nobody to be able to hold pubcasters accountable for the liberal (or hard-left) bias they spew with taxpayer money. They want you to put up -- and shut up. Already, Congress is deathly afraid of looking like they'd vote on the wrong side of Big Bird. The CPB Board is the only place in the federal government where someone might think liberal bias was an issue. So FAIR says, unplug it. Make the liberal bias blah-blah go away.
When one of those regular liberals, Aaron Barnhart of TV Barn, objects to the FAIR analysis as too ideological (just like those right-wingers), and sticks up for his local Kansas City PBS potentate Bill Reed, who fumed at conservative George Neumayr in a NewsHour debate and stuck up for the fairness of Bill Moyers (!), FAIR's Julie Hollar objects to the idea they're for "defunding" anything but conservative critics: "the one specific proposal suggested in our article would dramatically increase funding for public broadcasting, to $1 billion a year." He's still not impressed.
