An investment in quality journalism

[hfojvt]

PBS is doing its pledge week as I try to watch the second half hour of the Lehrer News Hour.

I certainly like how they have more depth on a wider variety of stories, without ever telling me anything about Paris Hilton or Britney. But it seems to me they miss the mark by not taking a stand.

They seem to advance the kinda widely held view that there's no such thing as truth. It's as if they would have the Heritage Foundation and the CBPP as guests and they each would talk about taxes. The Heritage Foundation would spin the Bush tax cuts that McCain wants to keep permanent and the CBPP would debunk their spin.

But the debate would never end. So PBS would just be giving a platform for the Heritage Foundation to spread their lies. Instead of being a journalist and digging up the facts, and presenting the truth, and afflicting the powerful and keeping them honest. As in "if you tell lies, we will tell our viewers".

Granted, they are a huge step up by even allowing people like Shields and maybe the CBPP have a say. Unlike the M$M where Charlie Gibson, who makes $5,000,000 a year presents Republican spin points as if they are truth - "capital gains tax cuts increase revenue", "middle class families make $200,000 a year". It should have made America's funniest videos when the audience kinda laughed him off the stage for that last one, but they don't always have an audience.

Anybody know what PBS did before the Iraq war? I think I was watching Simpson's re-runs then instead of the Lehrer News Hour. D'oh.

Sometimes they beat to death issues that I don't have that much interest in. Why do I need to know so much about Zimbabwe again? It's one thing to give a two minute report, it's another to discuss it for ten minutes.

That's the great thing about magazines. I subscribe to The Nation, The Progressive, and Mother Jones. I can skip over articles I don't want to read. (Much like most of DU is skipping over this one :o )

[truedelphi]

1. You have summed up ALL my thoughts on the News Hour. It can be

Rather decent but still not one of their commentators hails from anywhere BUT the Old Boy Network.

And like you say, what is this thing about fair and balanced??

I may say that the sun rises in the West, but why in the world shouldn't that be disputed, rather than defended?

Wrong is wrong and just once it would be nice to hear that no, there really isn't much logic to saying the middle class makes $ 200,000 a year.

Unless they want to bring in the argument that this inflationary society that has been created with its 400K homes and its 32K cars, with the $ 8.50/hr job if you are lucky, has indeed wiped out all the progress of the last forty years, so that all of us below 199,000 bucks in take home are just the working poor.

[hfojvt]

2. when I first started watching it seemed refreshing

Then it started to bug me when they spent so much time on stories that bored me. Plus all of the point-counterpoint seemed pointless, like thesis and antithesis without ever a synthesis. The viewer is left to make his own synthesis, but the problem is gonna be ideological. Flat earthers will make a flat earth synthesis and non-flat earthers will make a round earth synthesis. Not that obvious, but Republican viewers will agree with the Republican spin and Democrats with the Democrat spin without some kind of honest intelligent person to unspin both sides.

It's like Krugman wrote, the Republicans will say that chocolate ice cream is vanilla and the media will report that. Like Colbert 'joked' 'we say things and you write them down'. Instead of reporting what should be obvious - 'the emperor has no clothes' or 'clearly they are lying' the best they might do is also report 'some Democrats disagreed'. But what ever happened to having an investigative scholarly writer who would check on and report on the facts. So the news is not just 'some person says this' but also the more important information - the truth is 'this' or 'that'. So that if Bush or McCain say 'the Bush tax cuts don't primarily benefit the rich' it is objectively reported that they are full of sh*t and anybody else who tries to lie is similarly discredited or debunked.