Right Wing will do away with National Public Radio

The right wing conservatives won't be satisfied until the whole field of journalism is like FOX "News".  We're very close to that now, with mainstream journalists and their papers/TV channels owned by corporate conglomerates who dictate the news that We, the People are allowed to hear.  NPR is the last place for serious news, investigative news -- and the Republicans want to do away with it.  I know many Republicans who are good people.  They don't realize that they are voting against their own interests when they put Congressional representatives in power who will pull the rug out from under them--and us all.  I often think of these voters who seem to be blind to their own interests -- and wish that a glimmer of light would penetrate their rigid ideological stands and wake them up to what they are doing.  The following article could be a ray of light, if they would read it.  But most probably won't.  They don't like Bill Moyers, one of the authors -- perhaps because he worked in the Johnson administration. Or perhaps because he tells the truth.  FOX News listeners aren't used to hearing truth.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/bill-moyers/35040/npr-the-saga-continues

NPR: THE SAGA CONTINUES
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

EXCERPT: Once upon a time, in the early glory days of radio, corporate media took on the challenge of providing Americans with the kind of information critical to citizenship. No longer. Conglomerates long ago bought up the country’s commercial radio stations, closed down the news departments, and auctioned off the airtime to partisan polemicists or pre-packaged content devoid of journalism. Serious news on radio -- "the news we need to keep our freedoms," as the historian and journalist Richard Reeves once put it – has become the province of NPR (Full disclosure: We two have spent most of the last forty years toiling in the vineyards of public broadcasting, although never for NPR.)

In just the last few weeks, NPR has provided unique coverage of the job crisis in the United States, upheavals in the Middle East, and anxiety over the safety of nuclear power in the wake of the Japanese earthquake – as a matter of fact, many of the issues the House of Representatives should have been debating instead of posturing and pandering to its rightward political base.

Hear Steve Benen of Washington Monthly on the House Judiciary Committee’s vote the other day reaffirming “In God We Trust” as our national motto: "For months the new House Republican majority has wasted time on health care bills they know they can't pass, abortion bills they know they can't pass, climate bills they know they can't pass, and budget bills they know they can't pass. They've invested considerable time and energy on defending the Defense of Marriage Act, recklessly accusing Muslim Americans of disloyalty, going after NPR, and pushing culture-war bills related to vouchers, English as the 'official' language, and now 'In God We Trust.'"

And yes, on Thursday, following a number of missteps by NPR executives, including what has now been indisputably exposed as a disingenuous and dishonestly-edited video by a disreputable right-wing smear artist of the network’s chief fundraiser expressing some personal opinions,  the House passed a bill cutting off government funding for NPR – all of this part of the "vanity project," as Benen calls it, that House Republicans have been running in order to feed red meat to Fox News and the partisan talk radio hosts who have turned the public airwaves -- remember, the airwaves above our fair and bountiful land belong to you, Mr. and Mrs. and Ms. America – into a right-wing romper room.