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PBS’s Tavis Smiley: Our Babies are being Shot Dead in the Street, What’s the Use of having a Black President? (+video)

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Tavis Smiley is furious that President Obama has not done more to combat racism in America, and that anger was on full display Monday night. On his self-titled PBS program, Smiley unleashed a pair of long-winded leftist rants barely disguised as questions to his guest, Dr. Tricia Rose from Brown University.

Rose, who directs Brown’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, had suggested that Obama was incapable of ending structural racism in America by himself. Hearing that, Smiley erupted: “[I]f you’re right about this, then what the heck is the value of us celebrating a black president?”

Apparently Smiley had rather high hopes when President Obama was elected. He continued:

“But all of this hoopla about his being the first black president, if it doesn’t redound to you in some meaningful way when your back is to the wall and your babies are being shot dead in the streets, if it doesn’t redound to you in some meaningful way at that point… what is the value of having a black president?”

Read more from this story HERE.

Tomorrow’s PBS Election Special is Exactly Why PBS Shouldn’t be Publicly Funded (+video)

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The hour-long documentary [tomorrow] is being advertised as a “provocative conversation about race and politics,” from “both sides of the political aisle,” but it is being grossly mis-marketed. I know this because I was interviewed for and have already seen the film.

The program really deals very little with the 2012 election. It starts off pretending to be about the presidential campaign, but really isn’t at all – at least not directly. Instead it quickly devolves into a short history of how inherently racist the United States of America is, how aggrieved racial minorities still are, and how horrible white people, especially conservative white people, can be.

The brief section which deals with President Obama is a complete joke. Literally none of the “experts/commentators” whose interviews were used during that portion of the film are white. It is almost as if the film’s producers think a white person commenting on Obama is as fundamentally illegitimate as most liberals seem to think of a man’s opinion on abortion.

This is not just idle conjecture on my part. I gave the producers two separate interviews (both of which the producers went out of their way to lavishly praise), each of which was at least an hour long. Of that time, at least a full half hour was spent talking about the Barack Obama, about whose election I made a rather higher profile documentary of my own called “Media Malpractice.”

And yet, despite having – among many other things – declared Obama’s election to be “the most racist event I have ever witnessed,” not even one word from my statements about the president made it into the film. Instead, in the opening montage, they show me saying, “People are afraid to talk about race because they will be accused of being a racist, I am just too stupid to abide by that” …

The film is done almost completely from the perspective of liberal people of color. It perpetuates and justifies a grievance mentality among minorities. It claims without evidence that the Romney campaign is using coded language to denigrate minorities. It actively enables every ugly stereotype about whites and conservatives without even coming close to being an equal opportunity offender.

Read more from this story HERE.

PBS: Re-Educating America’s Schoolchildren

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By Mary Grabar and Tina Trent

When most people think of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s education programs, they remember the gentle Mr. Rogers welcoming children to his home, or documentaries offering exciting encounters with whales and other exotic creatures.

These shows still exist. But CPB today produces lessons that glorify the Black Panthers and riots and protests of the 1960s, present rocker Patti Smith as a “patriot” for singing songs that condemn President George W. Bush, vilify Wal-Mart, and sanctify environmentalist Rachel Carson. Although their educational materials claim to be objective, the truth is that their unrelenting ideological slant that promotes the politics of protest and civil disobedience is aimed at re-educating children into becoming far-left activists.

But whenever there are attempts to cut federal funding to CPB, the corporation points to its “educational programming” as proof that the approximately $450 million it receives annually from federal taxpayers is being put to good use. Big Bird and other members of the cast of Sesame Street show up in Congress to tell members of the educational value of CPB-funded programs.

The same justification is offered by state affiliates. For example, in 2011, Georgia Public Broadcasting’s marketing vice president, Nancy Zintak, defended their executives’ salaries by explaining that “80,000 Georgia teachers have downloaded data more than 5 million times from GPB’s educational website.”[1] [1]

Georgia taxpayers directly fund half of GPB’s annual $29 million budget. Millions more are funneled through the state’s public university budgets.

Teachers across the nation do turn to Public Broadcasting for videos, classroom projects, and even entire course syllabi. National statistics are elusive, but those 80,000 Georgia teachers downloading Public Broadcasting educational materials represent 63% of all public and private K – 12 educators in the state. If Georgia’s teachers are typical of educators in other states, it is clear that most K – 12 schools rely on PBS to teach subjects ranging from arithmetic to World History.