Great filmmaker but just a wee bit out of touch…
Left-wing Politico:
[T]he Civil War wasn’t the only thing on Burns’s mind as he visited Washington. As the budget battle continues in Congress, many lawmakers have discussed cutting off funding for public broadcasting, which has been Burns’s bread and butter for decades. …
“This is a completely foolhardy, unnecessarily partisan attempt at social engineering, of picking on something that they can score points with the base and it doesn’t make any sense and it will come back to hurt people. It won’t be a political hurt immediately, but what we’re talking about is whether we will retain our superiority as a country. That is the question. … If you’re serious about balancing the budget, then go and talk about much more significant parts of it, not a fraction of 1 percent of the whole budget. … People can make arguments about the marketplace, but if your house is on fire at 3 a.m., you don’t call the marketplace. When your road needs plowing, you don’t call the marketplace. The marketplace doesn’t have boots on the ground in Afghanistan. And while I would never suggest that public broadcasting has to do the defense of our country, it actually makes it worth defending.”
As for the notion that the reporting of such public broadcasting outlets as PBS and NPR skew liberal, Burns says that’s nonsense.
“This supposed bias, prove it. It may be true that if you line up every journalist in print, on TV, on the Internet that there may be a significant number of left-leaning people, but is their work that? … I don’t think you can start pigeon-holing ‘Sesame Street’ or Fred Rogers into a red-state, blue-state framework.”
Full piece here.
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