It’s well known by now that PBS has excluded the documentary Islam vs. Islamists: Voices From the Muslim Center from its American Crossroads series from reasons of “bias.”
As an American citizen and as a filmmaker, I find this despicable censorship. It is also based on an absurdly obvious lie:
All movies are biased. The form itself is biased. The camera is a pen, as the French auteur theorists correctly told us decades ago. Movie-making, documentary or not, is done through selection via script, camera and editing and those selections are made by wholly biased human beings. There has never been an unbiased film ever, not even Andy Warhol’s experiments, because the Warhol himself picked who he put in front of the camera and where he put them before setting his actors free.
And the biased nature of film has been known practically since the medium’s inception when early Soviet filmmakers like Dovzhenko demonstrated editing by visual association. In fact, it is arguable that films that appear to be less biased are more biased through the pretense of even-handedness - although perhaps this is over the heads of the bourgeois middlebrows at Public Broadcasting.
Nevertheless, one thing is clear: what the nabobs of PBS are objecting to is not bias at all, it is a bias they don’t like. They are censoring an opinion - that’s it. This makes them reactionaries - and cowards. Shame.
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11 Comments
1. ricpic:PBS dhimmis down.
May 3, 2007 - 11:52 am 2. Anthony (Los Angeles):Bravo, Roger. WETA’s reasons all boil down to “you didn’t toe the line of the dominant left-liberal myth.” The West has no chance to win this war with Salafist Islam as long the “media elite” refuse to confront the truth about our enemy and their own flawed assumptions.
May 3, 2007 - 12:27 pm 3. Mike K:It’s time to have a look at their funding. This has to be about money. The more they say, “It’s not about money….:
May 3, 2007 - 5:13 pm 4. Luther McLeod:Actually I think it is beyond money, or grants, or stipends. It has reached the point beyond all that. It has all become very personal and political i.e… this is my life, I dare anyone to invalidate my existence and worth, I’m very well educated, I have learned from the best, and oh…I paid a lot of money for my education…I know Greek/Latin and the basic tenet’s of communism/socialism and to hell with all you plebes who cannot understand the greater good. But where’s my monthly check?
All rot of course. Communism should never have been recognized as a viable method of government. White guilt has driven most, if not all, of our current condition, I could expand, but think it not neccesary for those here. Delete if needed Roger.
May 3, 2007 - 7:55 pm 5. Barrett:Roger, I concur. It is bias the PBS bureaucrats don’t like. (It’s just like Time magazine leaving GWB out of it’s list of most influential people.)
My question is why is the government in the television/broadcasting business at all?
There are plenty of alternatives out there today. We don’t need Uncle Sam’s PBS bureaucrats picking winners and losers. Futhermore, it’s our tax dollars being used to subsidize material that I, for one, often disagree with.
May 3, 2007 - 8:24 pm 6. Sandy P:About the time this was going down, I received the fundraising letter for our local station.
Wrote in big red letters, “Islam vs. Islamists”
Cowards, Dhimmis.
I think they’ll get the message.
May 3, 2007 - 8:54 pm 7. promoguy:Sandy P, good idea. I’m on my local’s list also.
And I’ll send it back in the postage paid envelope so it costs them a few pennies.
May 3, 2007 - 9:31 pm 8. Mike K:The ACLU has been swung further left by their contributers and I still think PBS funding has some peculiar connections. The pressure behind PBS and NPR funding comes from groups like Moveon.org.
This might be of interest.
May 4, 2007 - 11:09 am 9. MarkD:If I weren’t being taxed to pay for it, it would be PBS’s business.
Bias is expected. I suspect cowardice plays a large role as well.
May 4, 2007 - 12:00 pm 10. Captain Hate:Did anybody expect anything different from PBS, the cash playpen for useful fools like Bill Moyers and Tavis Smiley who could never succeed on a level playing field.
May 5, 2007 - 8:33 am 11. photoncourier.blogspot.com:Luther McL…”I’m very well educated, I have learned from the best, and oh…I paid a lot of money for my education…I know Greek/Latin and the basic tenet’s of communism/socialism”
Actually, I seriously doubt that the typical PBS bureaucrat knows Greek/Latin. I suspect that many of these people have had a higher education which consists largely of “social studies” (in the grade school sense of the term), which is something quite different from a rigorous traditional humanities education.
May 5, 2007 - 6:06 pm