Save NPR and PBS…Again (=yawn=)
I received the following mass-email from MoveOn.org this afternoon:
Everyone expected House Republicans to give up efforts to kill NPR and PBS after a massive public outcry stopped them last year. But they’ve just voted to eliminate funding for NPR and PBS — Âunbelievably, starting with programs like “Sesame Street.”
Public broadcasting would lose nearly a quarter of its federal funding this year. Even worse, all funding would be eliminated in two years–threatening one of the last remaining sources of watchdog journalism.
Sign the petition telling Congress to save NPR and PBS again this year.
Last year, millions of us took action to save NPR and PBS, and Congress listened. We can do it again if enough of us sign the petition in time.
This would be the most severe cut in the history of public broadcasting. The Boston *Globe* reports the cuts “could force the elimination of some popular PBS and NPR programs.” NPR’s president expects rural public radio stations may be forced to shut down.
The House and Senate are deciding if public broadcasting will survive, and they need to hear from viewers like you. Sign the petition at:
http://civic.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/
Thanks!
Okay, so the tone is a bit too alarmist. Even the *Globe* article says the proposed cuts will never make it past the Senate.
Like the Senate’s own debates on gay marriage and flag burning, the House’s passage of this bill is mostly an act of theatre, another attempt to shore up the Republican base by pandering to the Christian right. (It’s been a pattern that when small NPR stations fail, Christian broadcasters immediately swoop in and apply to license the vacated frequency. How charitable.) So maybe there’s not much to worry about.
Still, this little stunt comes on the heels of Ann Coulter’s appalling “I Spit on Your 9/11 Grave” moment, one more reminder that *nothing* is beneath these people.
Go sign the petition. What can it hurt?
June 9th, 2006 at 7:22 AM
Gay marriage, flag burning, public broadcasting – you forgot the “death tax.”
It’s a neo-con appeal-to-the-base jackpot!
June 9th, 2006 at 5:37 PM
How come we’re never asked to sign “save the CIA and NSA” petitions?
June 11th, 2006 at 3:46 AM
This is a blast of the long-running chain letter debunked on Snopes…
http://www.snopes.com/politics/arts/nea.asp
but now there is truth to it…
http://www.snopes.com/politics/arts/pbs2006.asp
June 11th, 2006 at 3:41 PM
Can I get a line on the “I spit on your 9/11 grave” thing? I’m not gettin’ any love from google on that one.
As for Nat’s question, can I take that as rhetorical? They serve The Man. (Maybe better said that they “serve us *to* The Man.”)
June 12th, 2006 at 6:47 PM
Ann Coulter, who had argued on numerous talk shows with a group of 4 9/11 widows who became political spokespeople for the Democrat Party, referred to THOSE FOUR as enjoying the fact that their husbands were killed, and proposed that perhaps their husbands were about to divorce them when 9/11 stopped them.
It was in horrible taste, and completely obliterated the point that she was trying to make (which was that if people who suffer a loss enter the political arena, that their loss should not make them immune from criticism). On the other hand, in many reports, it was made to sound as if she was saying that ALL 9/11 widows were enjoying their widowhood. And to show how contagious idiocy is, in Advertising Age, one spokesman stated that she should kill herself, and two New Jersey Assemblywomen have called for the banning of her book.
I have no problem with people not buying her book; based on her past history, she probably plagiarized most of it anyway.
June 18th, 2006 at 9:28 AM
What is up w/ Ann Coulter? What is her malfunction? She was on Leno and people were just yelling and clapping for her. I didnt get it. She seems off her rocker. But a day or two after her comments a cartoon appeared in my local paper about her. It showed a chart of her book sales and Ann sitting in a chair next to it holding a glass of champagne saying how the widows profited off 9/11.