This PBS dynamic had become second nature by the second Bush administration – and grew more entrenched after 2002 when Republicans gained control of all branches of the federal government. The few PBS holdouts, like Bill Moyers, were soon isolated and pushed toward the door.
Even when the invasion of Iraq turned sour and more prominent Americans began to speak up, CPB and PBS knew to rush to Bush’s defense. To correct for supposed “liberal bias,” CPB ordered up and funded the “America at a Crossroads” series.
In that sense, “America at a Crossroads” – and especially Perle’s “The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom” segment – has the look of Pravda during the Soviet era when the Russian people could learn what dissidents had to say mostly by reading between the lines of Pravda denouncing them.
The Perle-narrated program – and PBS’s disdain for the idea of giving equal time to the other side – had that kind of feel to it.
The likes of Martin Sheen and Tim Robbins were held up as enemies of the state, either disloyal or crazy. However, Perle still managed to present himself as the victim, noting that Robbins had written a play in which a character modeled after Perle was the bad guy.
Neocon Narrative
Perle also offered an uncontested neocon narrative of recent American history. In Perle’s narrative, liberals and other weak-minded people believed that the Soviet Union was invincible until Ronald Reagan told Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down that wall” and the Soviet empire collapsed.
After the program aired on April 17, I got a call from a former CIA analyst who was stunned by both the sophomoric quality of Perle’s narrative and PBS’s willingness to put such nonsense on its network. The ex-analyst noted that Perle was one of the hardliners who had opposed Reagan’s arms-control talks with Gorbachev near the end of Reagan’s term.
Beyond that, a true historical narrative would have shown that CIA analysts were aware of the disintegrating Soviet empire by the early-to-mid-1970s, but they were challenged and bureaucratically defeated by the neocons who argued that the Soviet Union was on the rise both economically and militarily, thus justifying bigger U.S. military budgets.
The neocon-led politicization of the CIA during the Reagan years resulted in the purging of the CIA’s top Soviet specialists and thus the silencing of dissent against the neocon alarmist view of expanding Soviet power.
The politicization caused the CIA to “miss” the Soviet collapse in the late 1980s. Ironically, the neocons then ridiculed the CIA’s analytical division and claimed credit for the “unexpected” demise of the Soviet Union. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
But the question now is what to do about PBS.
Why should American liberals and the Democratic Party continue to support an entity that has surrendered its journalistic principles and treats as crazy the two-thirds of the public that now opposes Bush’s Iraq War?
There might have been an argument for supporting PBS news programs if they could be protected from government financial pressure. But once the Republicans learned that they could wrest journalistic concessions from PBS by threatening its money, PBS changed unavoidably into a government propaganda agency.
During the unified Republican control of the federal government from 2003 to 2006, that PBS reality solidified, best represented today by the “America at a Crossroads” series. PBS is still responding to its Republican masters even though they no longer control Congress.
Given the 3,300 dead American soldiers and the widespread recognition that the Iraq War has been a disaster, what should be said about a corrupt and propagandistic entity like PBS that still is willing to carry water even if its timing is a little off?
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
