Seek and Ye Shall Find

In an effort to document cases of liberal bias at PBS, a consultant was secretly hired by republican CPB Chairman Ken Tomlinson. Guess what he found? Liberals, you betcha.

The content investigation was more of a scorecard, rating guests on PBS programs as either “pro-Bush” or “anti-Bush” (after much debate, this dichotomy was found to weed out pinkos faster than a “pro-mayonnaise” vs. “anti-mayonnaise” analysis). Unfortunately, this seemingly failsafe lefty sniping method had an alarming loophole for false positives: conservatives who do not support the President on all of his policies. Poor old republican Senator Chuck Hagel (NE) was incorrectly painted red by the consultant, thrown into the liberal pile based on his views concerning the Iraq war, which do not precisely line up with W’s. If that doesn’t discredit the findings of this investigation, surely the consultant’s conservative ties will squelch any doubt concerning his true motives.

Just today, 16 senators have called for Tomlinson to step down from his position, while media watchdogs have issued separate statements in protest of Tomlinson's cursory selection process for the hiring of a new Chief Executive of the CPB (a decision is expected tomorrow, the leading candidate is former Republican National Committee Co-Chair Patricia de Stacy Harrison).

UPDATE (6/23): Indeed, Patricia de Stacy Harrison was just named the new President of the CPB. Read the announcement here.

Comments

[Lee Hartsfeld]

CPB? Crazed, Powermad Bushies? The scary thing is, this type of report doesn't even register with me anymore. It's simply Bushness as usual.

Anyway, they'd have to cheat, to find signs of liberal bias on PBS. Next, they'll be finding signs of it at NPR, and it'll be time for the Men in White.

[Fatherflot]

Love the entry, but love the reproduction of the "Wacky Pack" card even better. Wacky Packs were an obsession to me as a kid growing up in the early 70's. There was a time when I even spent my CUB SCOUT DUES on Wacky Packs, only to catch hell with the folks. Anyhoo, this entry got me looking around the 'net and I turned up this page with reproductions of original Wacky Pack cards:
http://www.wacky-packs.com/series1.html

By the way, it turns out that Art Spiegelman of "Maus" and "cartoon editor of the New Yorker" fame created many of the original Wacky Packs.

[Zach in Philly]

Fatherflot, man, dude, it's people like you who keep the red carpet of love rolling out at WFMU. These cards have become a point of emerging obsession back at the row-ranch. The process of trying simply to describe them found me on the other side of a lens through which I looked bewildered at elders of yesteryear trying to describe an LSD trip. These things were the Piece de Resistance in the back of the school bus days providing that rare compliment to shaggy hair, AC/DC (et al.) Ts, and tattooed Pee-Chee Folders. Mondo Mahalo, yo~

[fatherflot]

Yo Zack, I assume the "row-ranch" refers to a Philly row house. Man, I lived in one during my undergrad days at Penn in the mid 80's. I lived on 40th street, between Spruce and Pine. One unit had about 15 Laotins living in one apartment and another had an insane alcoholic couple from Ghana. The wife once showed up at my door dead drunk at 10 am and dropped her towel, apparently expecting me to ravish her. When I failed to she returned to her room and screamed "Fucking Faggot!---I'll cut your dick off!" for about an hour. Her husband, also drunk about 24 hours a day, came up and apologized the next day, saying she sometimes had fits and needed to be tied up.

Man, I miss Philly!