About 40 leftists assembled with an unauthorized adult-size Elmo to protest the presence of capitalist David Koch on the board of Boston PBS superstation WGBH. They decried Koch as a “climate denier” and a “polluter” and demanded his resignation from the panel. The Elmo knockoff held a sign that said “Elmo Love WGBH / Elmo No Love Koch Lies.”
Conservatives apparently can’t serve at a PBS station in any way, for it compromises the system’s “independence.” That’s a code word for “hermetically sealed liberal bias.” "It’s not because we disagree with Mr. Koch politically,” argued protesting Rev. Fred Small in the Boston Herald. “It’s because he is about the destruction of politics in America as we know it.” Conservative dissent equals destruction of democracy. But the Reverend also dipped into the KKK basket:
"This board would not tolerate a Ku Klux Klansman," the Rev. Fred Small, a WGBH member and senior minister at First Parish Cambridge [Unitarian Universalist], told the trustees of the PBS flagship station. "It would not tolerate a notorious racist or anti-Semite. Yet you tolerate a man who has spent millions subverting democracy and disseminating lies about climate change in order to protect the profits from his own polluting industries."
...Draped in a WBUR windbreaker,Lee Stewart of Jamaica Plain called Koch — who has donated $18.6 million to ’GBH, including $10 million to the science program “NOVA” — “a climate denier, a polluter.”
“His presence is extremely offensive,” Stewart said. “People who are actively fighting to destroy the climate should not have equal political voice.”
After the protest, WGBH Director of Media Relations and Marketing Michael Raia told John Eggerton of Broadcasting & Cable that WGBH was all about diversity of views:
"Over more than a decade, in a dozen documentaries and investigative reports, WGBH has presented the science and facts about climate change in our award-winning documentary series Nova and Frontline, and we will continue to cover the full dimensions of this topic. Just as our viewers and listeners reflect a full spectrum of political and cultural views, so do our board members."
In reality, dating back to at least 1983, WGBH has presented a pile of one-sided, hide-your-kids, Earth-on-fire documentaries on climate change. These activists have convinced themselves – after Koch has donated for decades – that suddenly that propaganda stream is going to stop.
If WGBH were really all about the “facts,” they’d be revisiting their 10-hour 1990 horror-documentary classic “Race to Save the Planet" and apologizing profusely for getting it wrong:
The show’s host was Meryl Streep, who proclaimed: “By the year 2000, that’s less than 10 years away, the Earth’s climate will be warmer than it’s been in over 100,000 years. If we don’t do something, there will be enormous calamities in a very short time.” Earth Day founder Denis Hayes suggested that without an environmental revolution, man could cause “planetary death.”
Biologist Larry Harris stood in Florida predicting “the sea will come up about one foot within the next 25 to 40 years. That means that the edge of the sea, that we’re standing on today, will occur 10 miles north of here by about the year 2010.”
Florida hasn’t exactly suffered a dramatic loss of land mass in the last 20 years, as the show suggested in a animated section, in which Cape Cod and Long Island also shrunk dramatically. Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute saw doom even earlier, in the 1990s: “The future food security of the world is becoming more and more questionable. We could see food security replace military security as the principal preoccupation of many governments in the world during the 1990s.”
