The Wages of Woke

By G Murphy Donovan

The BBC is “something half way between a girl’s school and a lunatic asylum.” – George Orwell

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If you control the coast-to-coast pulpit, you can control the national message.

The US Corporation for Public Broadcasting, between PBS and NPR, controls nearly 1500 broadcast outlets, making it the largest media monopoly in America. Cooperative arrangements with British, Canadian, Japanese and various other EU state controlled radio and television webs make it the largest liberal media operation on the planet.

American CPB claims to be a matrix of local “independent and non-profit” stations when in fact CPB affiliates now receive revenue from, and share content with, state controlled partners like BBC and DW.

Triple dipping is now common with commercials, tax monies, and so called non-profit “charitable” tax deductible donations in the mix. When it comes to inscrutable tax-exempt, “non-profit” revenue sources, CPB is a trifecta plus, a self-flushing dark money toilet.

Taxpayers in America and Britain pay twice for costume confections like Downton Abbey and Henry  VIII. The same is true also for all that soap opera noir imported from Scandinavia. TV fluff is just a burka for the companion political spin, propaganda, and curated “news.” Jonathan Willoughby at BBC and Katherine Maher at NPR are examples of the kind of political, social, or ideological hucksters that populate statist media management and on-air news readers.

Fiscal hocus pocus, slights of hand, and rhetorical obfuscation at CPB is protected from public scrutiny by its private, non-profit status. CPB and its domestic and foreign affiliates are neither private nor non-profit, hence the adjective “public” is the oxymoronic keyword in the CPB, PBS and NPR world of partisan praxis, ambiguities, word salads, and acronyms.

CPB is in fact a liberal and/or establishment message control platform wearing a patronizing burka of partisan politics; politically correct pandering, and public service posturing. Surely there is a smidgen of unique programming on CPB platforms; classical music for example. But if the cost of a cultural genuflection is corrupt partisan news coverage and commentary, the price of that propaganda is too high.

Note to Elon and Vivek: partisan political pandering by our commercial legacy media may be as American as apple pie, but let’s not use tax monies to fund woke political bravo sierra on CPB airways – and then call it a charity or a tax exempt, necessary public “service.”

1. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of Intelligence and national security.