Bachman's snarky Navy Vets Charity Gave $$$ to MN's Public TV

[annm4peace]

http://dumpbachmann.blogspot.com/2010/07/snarky-navy-vets-charity-gave-to-public.html


The “US Navy Veterans Association” (which is under investigation and whose founder Bobby Thompson is a big campaign funder of

Michele Bachmann) was founded to promote war and increase defense spending.



Seems this group gave a grant of $6,300 to influence TPT-TV in St. Paul for these purposes.

(NO WONDER there has been so much pro-War, pro-Military shows on public TV) ( I wonder if there is access to all donor groups who have given money to TPT and what show they have sponsored. We know that Homeland Security has donated money to them, and many of us wrote TPT to ask they they not take such money. I wonder in the last 5 years,, how many shows have been prowar-military and how many pro-peace. ?)


Screenshots from the Navy Vets' 990's tell the sordid tale:

http://tinyurl.com/23cvuwe

Not included in the DB post is the attached screenshot from a Seattle PBS station newsletter.

Bobby Thompson's dirty $$$ was used to whip up support for the war.

[Coleen Rowley]

1. Conflicts of interest in public television programming and their funding

Also this post by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting seems very related: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4114

PBS stations around the country will begin airing a three-part, three-hour documentary tonight (7/12/10) about Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz. According to the New York Times (7/12/10), the unusually lengthy, completely uncritical tribute is partially sponsored by corporations linked to Shultz's corporate career.

The special, Turmoil and Triumph, was funded by the Stephen Bechtel Fund and Charles Schwab. Shultz was a board member at both companies, and was president of the Bechtel Corporation from 1975 to 1982.

Shouldn't we all be asking TPT to share what specifically was the programming that the "US Veterans Association" was paying for? The "Dump Bachmann" website has published this bit of info but TPT viewers need to ask more questions now and try to find out exactly what programs were aired that qualified for this donation from a big-moneyed, pro-war group which is apparently under investigation. Freedom of speech is a good thing and entities like this are certainly entitled to their opinions but if their contributions to public broadcasting are paying for certain viewpoints to be aired, that would seem to be a conflict of interest for the public broadcaster. I know when I watch the Charmin bathroom tissue commercial, that the manufacturers of Charmin are paying to try and influence me to buy their product. But most people don’t know that public television is being paid by special interest pro-war groups to get their product sold.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. Back in 1988, I spent a summer at the University of Michigan

and heard a talk by a former NPR reporter. (Her name was familiar at the time, but I have since forgotten it.)

It was a real eye-opener about how corporate contributors and pressure from Congress influence what is covered and how it is covered.

One example that she gave was from early in the Reagan administration, when she prepared a report about who had been helped and hurt by Reaganomics. (Her conclusion was that more people had been hurt.) She got called into her boss's office and told that one of the NPR underwriters, a major investment firm, had threatened to withdraw their considerable amount of support if her report ran. So it was spiked.

She also covered Central America as one of the few Spanish-speaking U.S. reporters (How hard should it be to find reporters who can speak Spanish? It isn't Pashto or Iraqi Arabic, for heaven's sake), and she was disgusted with her fellow reporters, who relied entirely on U.S. embassy press releases and cocktail party conversations with the elites who had gone to Ivy League schools. They would see something and make inferences from it, not understanding what people were actually saying, and report their imagined interpretation of the incident back to the U.S.

She also remarked that any news that is attributed to "Western embassy officials" is almost always from the U.S. embassy and that any news that is attributed to "Western intelligence sources" is almost always from the CIA.

[Avidor]

3. Screenshots

This is a screenshot from a Seattle public station newsletter:



Contribution to Bachmann: