Yesterday it was MyDD whining about a supposed lack of Bush popularity polls, today it’s a bitchfest about NewsHour with Jim Lehrer not being “Fair”
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, PBS’s flagship news program, touts its “signature style-low-key, evenhanded, inclusive of all perspectives”; Corporation for Public Broadcasting ombud Ken Bode called it “the mother ship of balance.” But a new FAIR study finds that the NewsHour fails to provide either balance or diversity of perspectives-or a true public-minded alternative to its corporate competition.
This statementis follwed by some statistics. Statistics which lack any kind of corresponding talk about the context of the shows themselves. Like this one
At a time when a large proportion of the U.S. public already favored withdrawal from Iraq, “stay the course” sources outnumbered pro-withdrawal sources more than 5-to-1. In the entire six months studied, not a single peace activist was heard on the NewsHour on the subject of Iraq.
Now, if the subject was, say “Why should we stay in Iraq?”, just how interesting a show would it be if every other source was a “peace activist”? The subject matter is still as damaging to the Iraq mission as a show about “Why we should leave Iraq?”, except that the viewers are listening to questions posed by a reasonable journalist/host instead of being subjected to a raving BDS sufferer.
Our good man David is the NewsHour expert around these parts, having watched this show for a couple of decades, but I frankly don’t see the problem here.
The NewsHour is interesting. At one point Rush Limbaugh was supposedly seriously considered as the weekly conservative political pundit — as is, every Friday I have to grit my teeth and sit through Mark Shields on the left and David Brooks only slightly more to the right.
They take their news footage almost exclusively from ITN, except when the correspondents do their own reporting pieces from time to time. ITN is not so insanely left as the BBC. On the other hand the NewsHour almost never runs the editorializing bits — they just run the parts that show what happened.
As for the commentator selection (the heart of the show), they always take care to have opposing commentators for each issue. They do tend to go for “establishment” academic types, which in the past has meant an overrepresentation of liberals for obvious reasons. But they almost never have any fire-breathers from either side of the fence. Thus the above complaint.