CT Blue

David Sirota recently reported that an anti pension billionaire fronted the money for PBS to produce a series pushing his viewpoint as objective journalism. Now he's reporting that the McNeil-Lehrer NewsHour is actually owned (did you know someone could “own” a PBS show?) by the for profit right wing Liberty Media Company.

Most Americans likely assume that the NewsHour (which, after all, is made with support from viewers like you) is actually owned and produced by PBS. It is an understandable assumption considering PBS’s own president declared that the NewsHour “is ours, and ours alone,” and further considering that the program receives millions of public dollars every year.

However, since 1994, the NewsHour has been produced and primarily owned by the for-profit colossus, Liberty Media. Liberty, which is run by conservative billionaire John Malone, owns the majority stake in MacNeil/Lehrer Productions – the entity that produces the journalistic content of the show. While other standalone public television projects are often produced by small independent production companies, the NewsHour stands out for being owned by a major for-profit media conglomerate headed by a politically active billionaire.

via Pando Daily

He goes on to make a strong case that those contributions from “viewers like you” have fattened the wallet of John Malone, Liberty's billionaire owner.

Now, you may know someone who watches the NewsHour. You may watch it yourself, and you may be saying: “Gee, I haven't noticed a right wing bias at the NewsHour. I mean, it's not like Fox News”.

That statement may be true; I don't watch it myself, though I've learned a bit about it just by the process of osmosis. But, there are subtler ways for billionaires to propagandize than what passes for news on Fox. In the case of the NewsHour, the best way to do it is in the way Malone apparently has: capitalize on its reputation for objectivity. There is more than one way to propagandize, and one very effective way (and one used a lot in this country) is to restrict the range of views that are presented to the American people as responsible and worth listening to. Nudge the boundary of acceptable discourse a smidgen to the right each year, and after a while you have effectively silenced those who were once considered relatively mainstream.

We see it all the time. It is simply not acceptable in mainstream discourse to fail to genuflect at the altar of deficit reduction, particularly when there is a Democratic President. Similarly, there is unanimity in discussions about social security. All responsible pundits must agree that benefits are too generous, and we must all tighten our belts (some belts, of course, start out a lot looser than others). No one is allowed to argue that deficits might be a good thing when, as now, we suffer from a lack of demand, or that maybe we should be talking about increasing Social Security benefits. These voices exist out there, but how often do they get on the NewsHour. You can exercise power both by including certain voices and excluding others. Malone and Liberty Media serve the right wing cause by excluding views from what is perceived by almost everyone as the responsible mainstream. The national conversation moves ever rightward. It's not as loud or obnoxious as Fox, but it may be more effective.