Our feisty local tabloid has found the perfect target:
Brie-eating, Chardonnay-sipping, taxpayer-dollar-sucking public television.
As in, local public broadcaster WGBH.
Yesterday’s Boston Herald front page:
Today’s addition:
Your tax dollars turn on WGBH
The flagship of public television, WGBH — which claims taxpayer money accounts for just a small fraction of its budget — has in fact scored more than $80 million in obscure federal handouts over the past half-dozen years, a Herald review found.
The public broadcasting titan has pulled in more than $50 million in federal funding over the past six years from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — including $11.5 million this year, or about 8 percent of its 2011 operating budget.
However, WGBH honchos acknowledged yesterday they have received another $80 million in federal money for various programming . . .
This is the perfect sturm und drang for the Herald: class warfare, taxpayer dollars, sitting duck.
(The hardworking staff knows its use of sturm und drang plants it squarely in the Herald’s crosshairs, but that’s life. Also in the disclosure department: I used to work at WGBH. Then again, so did Howie Carr.)
The whole NPR/PBS/liberal bias rumpus is catnip to the Herald.
Prediction: They won’t let up sooner than they have to.
Campaign Outsider 
Who cares what those Boston Herald, American cheese-eating, beer-guzzling, right-wing pseudo-conservative ass-kissing panders think ?
Yikes.
Seems to me that the storm around NPR, PBS and WGBH is self-inflicted.
Never said otherwise, Mudge.
Does the Herald even pretend to report new anymore, or are they just an inferior promotional brochure for conservative idea? What does it say about their opinion of their target audience when they put covers on their paper like this. They can’t think very highly of them. OTOH, they may be reaching out as peers to that audience, which doesn’t say much about the viewers or the paper.
I thought GBH was kind of a fat target when they suddenly had millions to buy WCRB after saying that they needed every last viewer dollar over and over for weeks on end.
As for the Herald, wasn’t there a worker in the plant who was gunned down after he complained about the drug dealing going on there? I don’t remember the exact year but I do remember that it was soon after that that the publisher accepted an award for his anti-drug activity.
Not sure about the Herald worker, but ‘GBH definitely got shot.
Beat The Press oughtta have a field day with this and the NPR video dust-up tonight. As far as the latter is concerned…Dems/Liberals have a backbone filled with Jell-O and, regardless of the issue, simply don’t know how to fight. They should take a memo from Gov. Walker in Wisconsin, who merely doubled his intransigence when similarly video-punked. (Voters will likely get the last laugh, but that’s another story.)
Even sadder about the NPR fiasco re: Tea Party is that the basic, bottom-line facts are TRUE (as was the case with Dan Rather’s hastily engineered exit from CBS.)
P.S. Walker not _video_ punked…just punked, and spectacularly.
“Obscure” funding from the federal government? It’s only obscure to ignorant journalists.
WGBH gets a small part of their funding directly from the federal government in a specific appropriation. A much larger piece comes from competitive contracts and grants. Nothing obscure about any of it.
Not to mention all the recent reports on what percentage of fed money local public broadcasters get.
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