Public Television Doesn’t Mean Big Bird, It Means Islamist, Russian and Chinese Propaganda
October 27, 2012 By Daniel Greenfield
Read article at Frontpagemag.com
Big Bird is in no danger of going anywhere, with hundreds of millions of dollars in its nest egg. Sesame Street makes for a nice public face for public broadcasting, but public broadcasting isn’t anywhere as cozy as that. But it’s actually worse than that.
CCTV, an official propaganda arm of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party, is being distributed to public television stations in the U.S. through a public television programming service called MHz Worldview, a project of MHz Networks.
The federally-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) funneled $27,580,113 into MHz Networks and its affiliates in fiscal year 2011.
MHz Networks is a division of Commonwealth Public Broadcasting, based in Richmond, Virginia, and distributes Al-Jazeera, the voice of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Moscow-funded Russia Today (RT) channel, and CCTV, under the rubric of “Programming for globally-minded people.” MHz Worldview calls itself “alternative programming for U.S. public TV stations and other distributors.”
All of these foreign propaganda channels are being broadcast in English.
Kenney hired a lawyer to file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission, arguing that the contracts between the public TV stations affiliated with Commonwealth are being improperly used for the purpose of broadcasting foreign propaganda in the U.S. Violations of the rules can result in financial fines and revocation of broadcast licenses. “U.S. taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize the distribution in the U.S. of another country’s propaganda,” Kenney says.
Kenney has also filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice alleging that the foreign propaganda channels are violating the law by not disclosing in their propaganda broadcasts that they are agents of foreign powers.
That’s 27 million dollars that poor CPB funneled into pushing enemy propaganda broadcasts into the United States. Here is the actual text of Kenney’s complaint. And maybe Team Big Bird should rename itself Team Putin or Team Qatar.