The New York Times has an unusually deliberately obtuse editorial this morning, once again flogging Big Bird into the corral, to plead for public funding of left wing propaganda on PBS. It contrasts the departure of the "respected Bill Moyers," whose "slight liberal flavor might be dug out" with the arrival of the "openly ideological conservative editorialists" Tucker Carlson and Paul Gigot, to make the case that PBS is going crazy—right, anyways. As if Moyers' program NOW went off the air (it hasn't), or the documentary series P.O.V. stopped being leftist.

Keep in mind that Moyers has recently been caught red—handed fabricating the slanderous charge that former Secretary of the Interior James Watt doesn't care about environmental damage, because he awaits the Biblical apocalypse. Moyers has been forced to apologize. It is hard to get much more rigidly ideological than Moyers.

A fallback position has arisen for the Times and others anxious to keep the subsidies flowing to PBS: turn it into a foundation, with an endowment generated by sale of the spectrum (belonging to taxpayers) assigned to PBS, once digital broadcasting is firmly established. Instead of depending on Congressional appropriations, which may be dicey, given the Republican trend of American politics, insulate PBS from all accountability by grabbing a huge chunk of public money.

Dream on.

Thomas Lifson  2 21 05