Dumping The Corp For Pub B'casting

I think that the US Gubmunt should get out of the public broadcasting biz. There’s just too much corruption potential in action to make it work any more. If we still had the Fairness Doctrine, there’d be hope, but we’re now seeing the full flower of its abolition, and the product (NPR) is rotten and toxic. Sorry Member Stations, a new architecture will have to emerge, and through this reinvention, new opportunities will develop.

As usual, ignorant hacks like the CPB-hating Republicans (and most everybody else in Congress) are barking up the wrong tree. It’s two failed wars and a morbidly obese Defense Dept. that should be hacked at FIRST. Uh, duh!

The Brits may have been able to pull off the BBC for over 80 years, but they’re laying off people right and left. The Beeb is being cut past the bone. I was in BBC’s Bush House in London recently and there was a hard-to-explain but palpable feeling of impending doom there. Americans may not know that citizens in the UK pay hefty fees to support their BBC. I remember paying 17 pounds for a black and white TV license in the early 80s. Colour TV cost about 45 pounds – a huge sum back then. That was just to HAVE a TV. (Those damn Brit socialists! Never mind that fees were an incentive for the BBC to conscientiously provide high quality news and entertainment to a fee-paying public.)

No, I think that the US is just stuck in their ongoing adolescent behavior as far as public funding for broadcasting is concerned. And here’s the wringer: if the Congress has allowed NPR to become what it is today, they are complicit in propaganda production, the whole of which needs to exposed. (But probably never will be.)


AND

Indeed, Inskreep was at his majestic-powerful best today, trying to (subtly) rip the Wisc. Dem senator a new one. He makes sure that his rapier verbiage takes pride of place, especially when talking to a cowardly runaway pinko with his diminished cell-phone voice and all. And then the I-kreep trademark: leave ‘em twisting in the wind at the end by the little pause and the fake cordiality at the end. And the interviewee, wondering if he/she’s just been screwed (via creative editing), is nevertheless obliged to offer up the now standard parting: ‘My pleasure’. The pleasure was all I-kreep’s. You can imagine his smile as he wipes his sword off with a satin sheet. Oh, but he’s way too suave to be a ‘gotcha’ dude. He’s more like ‘I believe I just sautéed the nuts off that, that, conceited (fill name in blank)’. That’s maybe giving him too much credit for any sophistication, but standard NPR smugness can cover it on all occasions.

‘My pleasure’ they say, even after covering a drone party in Pak. Everybody’s high on ‘pleasure’ at NPR. Of course, the difference between pain and pleasure has always been a bit of a blur.

These are among the tools that help keep NPR on the winning side (they think).

I actually wonder how big people at NPR (e.g. Viv et al) actually, truly, privately, regard Inskreep: insolent prick or genius hip journalisto? Amphetamine-popping goldmine or potential quick burnout, entirely dispensable? Sexy boytoy or closet perv?

Who could have foretold that US media would have ever sunk so low in the sewer?