End Taxpayer Support of PBS Propaganda

As regular readers of Liberty and Power know David Beito has pointed out CBS’s Sixty Minutes broadcasted some extremely poor journalism in regards to the Emmett Till case. However, at least CBS paid for that tripe themselves. In today’s Washington TimesBruce Bartlett tells about a partially taxpayer funded program on PBS, Frontline, with even lower standards of journalistic integrity.

Although the program’s chief correspondent, Hedrick Smith, spent several hours interviewing him, Bartlett’s total on camera time ended up being about three seconds. In today’s column Bartlett relates some of the many salient facts left out of the Frontline attack piece. He wrote, “I also noted to Mr. Smith that Wal-Mart, all by itself, was responsible for a significant amount of the U.S. productivity miracle over the last decade. In a 2001 report, the McKinsey Global Institute, a respected think tank, concluded Wal-Mart's managerial innovations increased overall productivity by more than all the investments in computers and information technology of recent years. Other Frontline omissions included the fact that Wal-Mart’s lower prices primarily benefit the poor and research by University of Missouri economist Emek Basker, which concluded that when Wal-Mart comes to town local employment sees a permanent rise.

Bartlett’s column is one more piece of evidence in a long chain, which points to the conclusion that taxpayer funding of PBS distortion is an unjustified waste.