The Corporation For Public Broadcasting
THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING,
Corporation for Public Broadcasting funded Rory Kennedy’s LAST DAYS IN VIETNAM for American Experience. Kennedy’s piece focuses accurately upon the American betrayal of the South Vietnamese in 1975. It criticizes Ambassador Graham Martin for delaying evacuations, including his own. But unlike Graham Martin, the film fails to adequately cover antiwar lobbying to cutoff off aid which was the greater betrayal by Congressional, not Ford or Nixon. Kennedy’s production passes over Graham predictions of consequent horrors--executions, reeducation camps, forced migrations, confiscations of private property and persecution of the religious, including Buddhists.
Congress created and funds CPB to support public broadcasting, radio, television, online and mobile. “CPB’s mission is to ensure universal access to non-commercial, high-quality content and telecommunications services” by distributing funds to 1,500 locally owned public radio and television stations.
CPB does not produce programming, but it funds content to “inform, educate, enlighten and enrich the public,” particularly children and minorities. It funded Burns The Roosevelts: An Intimate History and The Brain with David Eagleman as well as children’s Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and Odd Squad. Past projects include On Two Fronts: Latinos & Vietnam. CPB is inclusive regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, religion, culture, point of view and geography. For example, Pacifica radio routinely broadcasts socialist-Marxist rhetoric of class warfare and anti-capitalism. PBS’s “All Things Considered” doesn’t. The CPB supports public radio at historically black colleges and universities minority and Native American public radio stations.
Funds from taxpayers find their way from Congress to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting System to the Public Broadcasting System to Florentine Films to Ken Burns. Besides Burns documentaries, PBS is renowned for “Frontline’s” and Bill Moyers’s tales of corporate corruption, crooked politicians, oppression and diversity. “Nova” laments destruction of nature.
George Soros founded Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting, CIPB, from his Open Society Institute. CIPB claims commercial TV, funded by private advertising, is ruled by corporations suppressing progressive ideas like social justice. The Ford Foundation has given tens of millions to both PBS and National Public Radio, NPR. Key sponsor of an antiwar commemoration of the Vietnam War, Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, gave $200 million for public television and radio. John S. and James L. Knight Foundation gave $3 million for “interactive public affairs programming on public television.”