Skeptic Ginger
4th October 2006, 03:28 AM
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/index.html
"A Swashbuckling Spectacle of Corruption" - Bill Moyers Investigates Abramoff Lobbying Scandal (http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/02/1321259&mode=thread&tid=25) is the first part. The second is on the split over global warming among the Evangelical movement and the third, and most important is on the threat to Internet freedom of information.
This is a three part series, one each Wed night for 3 weeks. Moyers left PBS to have the freedom to criticize the Bush infringement on free speech imposed when Bush tried to have a Republican front man turn PBS into a mouthpiece for the Republican Party.
AMY GOODMAN: Why are you back on PBS? You left NOW. I want to ask you about the storm over Kenneth Tomlinson. Of course, we know that he paid, what, something like $14,000 to have you and others monitored for political content, your broadcasts on PBS. He has been embroiled in one scandal after another now. The latest, let me read from an earlier headline: “More trouble for former Corporation for Public Broadcasting chair Kenneth Tomlinson -- the State Department concluded Tomlinson committed several ethics violations in his current position chairing the board that oversees most U.S. broadcasts to foreign countries. According to investigators, Tomlinson gave a friend $250,000 in taxpayer-funded contracts, overbilled the government for his time and used federal employees for his personal business. Among that personal business, running a stable of thoroughbred horses he named after leaders from Afghanistan, including President Hamid Karzai. This is only the latest scandal that has come out for the former Reader’s Digest editor and longtime Republican. Tomlinson was forced out of the CPB last year after it was revealed he improperly tried to promote conservatives in the organization and monitored programs he accused of having a liberal bias.”
BILL MOYERS: Well, this is the man that George W. Bush and Karl Rove allowed -- appointed to serve as chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the board of governance of Public Broadcasting, and to serve as chairman simultaneously of the overseas -- the Board of Governors of the overseas --
AMY GOODMAN: The BBG, right. Board of Broadcasting.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, the BBG. I mean, this is an ideological hack who was allowed to work his will behind closed doors, until he was exposed. And one of reasons I left my weekly broadcast on Public Broadcasting was to go public with what I knew he was doing. I couldn't do it while I was on the air, because it would have seemed self-serving. Well, his misdeeds cost him his chairmanship of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But Bush and the White House and Karl Rove allowed him to stay on the Board of Governors of the Overseas Broadcast, and he still is there, because even though this recent round of sleazy activities was revealed, on a partisan vote, 3-to-3, the Republicans voted to keep him in power. I don't understand it, but it's typical of the attitude toward the public interest.
You ask why I’m back. As I listened to you begin this broadcast with the litany of reality that you report, I got a slow burn, you know, at just what's happening to this country, to our government and to America under the reign of the corporate, political and religious right. And there are so few places that, as you are doing, are just simply telling the other side of the story, letting the facts add up, that I realize I couldn't sit in the rocking chair and comfortably enjoy the books I’m reading, while our democracy, it needs all the information those of us who are independent journalists can provide. So I came back, because there just is too much to report and too much to tell, at a particular time when I think we’re in a -- when our democratic form of government is in the most precarious state since the Depression.
"A Swashbuckling Spectacle of Corruption" - Bill Moyers Investigates Abramoff Lobbying Scandal (http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/02/1321259&mode=thread&tid=25) is the first part. The second is on the split over global warming among the Evangelical movement and the third, and most important is on the threat to Internet freedom of information.
This is a three part series, one each Wed night for 3 weeks. Moyers left PBS to have the freedom to criticize the Bush infringement on free speech imposed when Bush tried to have a Republican front man turn PBS into a mouthpiece for the Republican Party.
AMY GOODMAN: Why are you back on PBS? You left NOW. I want to ask you about the storm over Kenneth Tomlinson. Of course, we know that he paid, what, something like $14,000 to have you and others monitored for political content, your broadcasts on PBS. He has been embroiled in one scandal after another now. The latest, let me read from an earlier headline: “More trouble for former Corporation for Public Broadcasting chair Kenneth Tomlinson -- the State Department concluded Tomlinson committed several ethics violations in his current position chairing the board that oversees most U.S. broadcasts to foreign countries. According to investigators, Tomlinson gave a friend $250,000 in taxpayer-funded contracts, overbilled the government for his time and used federal employees for his personal business. Among that personal business, running a stable of thoroughbred horses he named after leaders from Afghanistan, including President Hamid Karzai. This is only the latest scandal that has come out for the former Reader’s Digest editor and longtime Republican. Tomlinson was forced out of the CPB last year after it was revealed he improperly tried to promote conservatives in the organization and monitored programs he accused of having a liberal bias.”
BILL MOYERS: Well, this is the man that George W. Bush and Karl Rove allowed -- appointed to serve as chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the board of governance of Public Broadcasting, and to serve as chairman simultaneously of the overseas -- the Board of Governors of the overseas --
AMY GOODMAN: The BBG, right. Board of Broadcasting.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, the BBG. I mean, this is an ideological hack who was allowed to work his will behind closed doors, until he was exposed. And one of reasons I left my weekly broadcast on Public Broadcasting was to go public with what I knew he was doing. I couldn't do it while I was on the air, because it would have seemed self-serving. Well, his misdeeds cost him his chairmanship of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But Bush and the White House and Karl Rove allowed him to stay on the Board of Governors of the Overseas Broadcast, and he still is there, because even though this recent round of sleazy activities was revealed, on a partisan vote, 3-to-3, the Republicans voted to keep him in power. I don't understand it, but it's typical of the attitude toward the public interest.
You ask why I’m back. As I listened to you begin this broadcast with the litany of reality that you report, I got a slow burn, you know, at just what's happening to this country, to our government and to America under the reign of the corporate, political and religious right. And there are so few places that, as you are doing, are just simply telling the other side of the story, letting the facts add up, that I realize I couldn't sit in the rocking chair and comfortably enjoy the books I’m reading, while our democracy, it needs all the information those of us who are independent journalists can provide. So I came back, because there just is too much to report and too much to tell, at a particular time when I think we’re in a -- when our democratic form of government is in the most precarious state since the Depression.