Ben Affleck Demanded PBS Suppress His Slave-Owning Ancestry

While participating in the 2014 PBS genealogy series Finding Your Roots, Ben Affleck learned that he had an ancestor who owned slaves. While participating in the 2014 PBS genealogy series Finding Your Roots, Ben Affleck learned that he had an ancestor who owned slaves. Hacked Sony emails, posted publicly by WikiLeaks this week, show that the famed actor openly attempted to prevent the information from making it into the show’s final cut.

Gawker pointed out on Saturday morning that a July 2014 email chain between PBS host Prof.Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton show the pair cryptically conversing over the peculiar production request from a big name like Affleck.

Let’s go to the email chain. First Gates mentions a suppression request from a certain “megastar” (emphasis added):

Lynton responds that the situation is “tricky,” but that he suggests removing the fact if “no one else knows” and the show can get away with it (emphasis added again):

The pair then went back and forth about whether it’s worth compromising for “Batman,” and how it could hurt the brand to not give in to his request:

Affleck’s episode aired on October 14, 2014, and did not include anything about a slave-owning ancestor.

Via: Mediaite

Continue Reading....

PBS Host Calls MSNBC Anchor and MSNBC Contributors 'Advocates' - To Their Faces

Talk about calling a spade a spade.

On MSNBC's NOW Wednesday, PBS's Jeff Greenfield called host Alex Wagner as well as the MSNBC contributors on the panel - David Corn, Joy Reid, and Katrina vanden Heuvel - "advocates" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

 JEFF GREENFIELD, PBS: One of the things that struck me about Obama when he came out – and frankly, I’ve felt this about the President since he was campaigning - he talks too much.

ALEX WAGNER, HOST: So you think he should be less transparent?

GREENFIELD: No wait - a 28 minute speech is 26 minutes too long about what happened, surrounded by the same kind of, you know, human props, that poor pregnant diabetic who almost collapsed. It was too long. It was, what he might have learned from Winston Churchill was to begin by saying, “We screwed up.”

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL, THE NATION: But he did say that.

GREENFIELD: “We screwed up, we screwed up, and we are going to fix it.” I’ll tell you the other thing, look, I realize, you know, sometimes networks can be, I want to just, want to be a counter-arguer.

[Laughter]

WAGNER: You’re allowed to do whatever you want.

GREENFIELD: Because I don’t represent myself, I represent myself as a humble country journalist, not an advocate. But what you said…

WAGNER: I think many people at this table would consider themselves journalists, too, not advocates.

GREENFIELD: Who are also advocates.

WAGNER: No, we’re not.

GREENFIELD: [Turning to Vanden Heuvel] Progressives and liberals.

VANDEN HEUVEL: [Nods]

WAGNER: We can get into that discussion later.

Via: Newsbusters
Continue Reading..... 

[VIDEO] Tavis Smiley: 'Black People Will Have Lost Ground in Every Single Economic Indicator' Under Obama

PBS's Tavis Smiley made a comment Thursday that every African-American as well as liberal media member should sit up and take notice.

Appearing on Fox News's Hannity, Smiley said, "The data is going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

SEAN HANNITY, HOST: My last question to you. You often do these seminars with the state of black America. I've watched them on C-Span and different channels, right?

TAVIS SMILEY: Right.

HANNITY: Are black Americans better off five years into the Obama presidency?

SMILEY: Let me answer your question very forthrightly. No, they are not. The data is going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category. On that regard, the president ought to be held responsible.

But here's the other side. I respect the president. I will protect the president. And I will correct the president. He's right on this government shutdown. Republicans are thwarting the rule of law with the Constitution. If they let this debt go into default, they're trampling again on the Constitution.

Wow!

Now to be fair to Smiley, he has been hard on the president concerning how his policies are economically damaging the black community, but this is the first time I believe he's been this harsh on national television with such a large audience.

Sadly, he's right.

So why would this community re-elect someone doing so much damage to them economically?

Is it possible they're not aware of it because most liberal media members other than Smiley aren't reporting it?

Hmmm.

Via: Newsbusters

Continue Reading....

How The New York Times Remembers 9/11 Aftermath: Flag-waving a 'Cousin to Intolerance'

Since it’s the twelfth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, here’s a slightly dated outrage. On September 4, TV critic Neil Genzlinger of The New York Times tackled a CNN documentary called “The Flag,” which focused on an American flag that three firefighters raised at Ground Zero late on the afternoon of the attacks. A photo taken for the New Jersey newspaper The [Bergen] Record “became a heartening, patriotic symbol for many on an otherwise awful day, and so did the flag itself.”

But the flag disappeared, and that story spurred the CNN program. Genzlinger ruined the review by dragging out the old leftist saw that flag-waving and “intolerance” are closely related:

The photographer rebelled at efforts to make him a celebrity, and so did the three firefighters. A plan to turn the photograph into a sculpture became a source of controversy. Nationwide, flag-waving was sometimes a cousin to intolerance.

This is the same critic who complained about the PBS series on the Constitution that put liberal NPR game-show host Peter Sagal on a motorcycle ride across America – that was an ecological offense: “

And when did Mr. Sagal’s vehicle of choice, a motorcycle, morph into a symbol of freedom, when anyone who has ever been awakened by one late at night wishes the Bill of Rights had something in it about freedom from noise pollution?

Anyway, what’s irksome about the format is that it has become so common that it just feels like an excuse for the host to do some traveling in a way that unnecessarily burns fossil fuel. If you’re making a travel show, sure, get in or on some eye-catching vehicle and drive across America. If you’re making a show about current constitutional debates, just read a newspaper. If you need to go someplace where such a debate has occurred, take public transportation.

You might call that transporation intolerance.

Via: Newsbusters

Continue Reading....

CNN Reporter: Obama’s Claim U.S. Directly Threatened by Syrian Chemical Weapons ‘Very Dubious’

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama told PBS reporters that America could be threatened by Syrian chemical weapons in the event that the West does not intervene in that civil war. He said that, unchecked, Syrian chemical weapons could fall into the wrong hands and be “directed at us.” A CNN reporter reacted to that news by saying it was “very dubious” that the United States could be directly threatened by Syrian chemical weapons. 

Obama told PBS reporters that the crisis in Syria represents a threat to American national security because Syrian chemical weapons could be directed at U.S. interests:

When you start talking about chemical weapons in a country that has the largest stockpile of chemical weapons in the world, where over time, their control over chemical weapons may erode, where they’re allied to known terrorist organizations that, in the past, have targeted the United States, then there is a prospect, a possibility, in which chemical weapons that can have devastating effects could be directed at us.

RELATED: Obama on PBS Newshour: No Decision Yet on Syria, but If We Do Go In…

CNN anchor asked Suzanne Malveaux asked Foreign Affairs Correspondent Jill Dougherty if the president was referring to the United States itself or American interests abroad or allies like Israel. Dougherty agreed that Obama was probably not talking about the United States when he said “us.”

“National interests can be affected by what happens to the allies of the United States,” Dougherty said. “And it is very dubious that Syria could ever launch some type of chemical weapons directly against the United States.”

Watch the clip below via CNN:

Via: Mediaite.com

Continue Reading....

[VIDEO] Obama: Voter-ID Laws Probably ‘Partisan,’ but Also Have ‘Racial Element’

In an interview on PBS NewsHour following his speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington yesterday, President Obama said that he would “move administratively” to block state laws “that seem to be intent on preventing people from voting and that have a racial element to it.”

In a reference to his Department of Justice’s suing the state of Texas over its voter-ID law, Obama said: “Congress doesn’t move real quickly around here, and if we can go ahead and move administratively so that our attorney general can go ahead in jurisdictions that seem to be intent on preventing people from voting and that have a racial element to it, even though largely it’s probably for partisan reasons, then we need to go ahead and — and enforce the law.”

His comments echoed a line in his speech yesterday calling for “vigilance” against “those who erect new barriers to the vote.”

Via: National Review Online

Continue Reading....

NYT: Obama’s Aura of Defeat

In an argument that was echoed and amplified around the liberal twittersphere yesterday, New York’s Jonathan Chait made the case that the Romney campaign has bluffed the press into covering the last two weeks of the campaign as though Obama’s losing. Like George W. Bush in 2000, who famously (and probably foolishly) campaigned in California to lend himself an air of inevitability in the closing days of the campaign, Team Romney’s current brash confidence is designed to persuade the media to overlook the underlying numbers that still point to an advantage for the incumbent. And it’s working, Chait argues: The “widespread perception that Romney is pulling ahead,” he writes, “is Romney’s campaign suckering the press corps with a confidence game.”

I agree with Chait that the numbers still show Obama with a slightly clearer path than Romney to an (excruciatingly narrow) electoral college victory. But if you’re looking for a reason (besides, of course, the national polling showing an ever-so-slight Romney edge) why the media narrative has tilted toward the Republicans over the last week or so, I think the Romney campaign’s guarantee of victory has mattered much less than the Obama campaign’s recent aura of defeat.

Losing campaigns have a certain feel to them: They go negative hard, try out new messaging very late in the game, hype issues that only their core supporters are focused on, and try to turn non-gaffes and minor slip-ups by their opponents into massive, election-turning scandals. Think of John McCain’s desperate hope that elevating Joe the Plumber would change the shape of the 2008 race, and you have the template for how tin-eared and desperate a losing presidential campaign often sounds — and ever since the first debate cost Obama his air of inevitability, he and his surrogates have sounded more like McCain did with Joe the Plumber than like a typical incumbent president on his way to re-election. A winning presidential campaign would not normally be hyping non-issues like Big Bird and “binders full of women” in its quest for a closing argument, or rolling out a new spin on its second-term agenda with just two weeks left in the race, or pushing so many advertising chips into dishonest attacks on its rival’s position on abortion. A winning presidential campaign would typically be talking about the issues that voters cite as most important — jobs, the economy, the deficit — rather than trying to bring up Planned Parenthood and PBS at every opportunity. A winning presidential campaign would not typically have coined the term “Romnesia,” let alone worked it into their candidate’s speeches.
Via: New York Times

Continue Reading...

Why Big Bird’s Federal Subsides Need to Go

The call to eliminate federal subsidies to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), such as Governor Mitt Romney’s recent statement, shouldn’t ruffle the famous fowl.

After all, not only does PBS not need taxpayer support, but because it inevitably entangles Big Bird in politics, it does him more harm than good.

Federal contributions to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which distributes money to PBS, totaled $444 million in FY 2012. While that may not be a lot in Washington, which spent a whopping $3.54 trillion that year, it is real money to most Americans.

But ending these subsidies wouldn’t break the bank for public broadcasting. In FY 2010 (information available to date), the CPB subsidies amounted to only 15 percent of public broadcasting station’s total funding. Other sources included listener and viewer contributions, university and foundation support, and business underwriting. Sesame Street itself received only $1.4 million in a federal grant through CPB in FY 2012. As Sherrie Westin, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Sesame Workshop, affirms:

[Sesame Workshop] receives very, very little funding from PBS. So, we are able to raise our funding through philanthropic, through our licensed product, which goes back into the educational programming, through corporate underwriting and sponsorship.

Big Bird and his popular Sesame Street neighbors would not disappear if federal ties are severed. Westin adds that “when they always try to tout out Big Bird, and say we’re going to kill Big Bird—that is actually misleading, because Sesame Street will be here.”

The “Golden Condor” has quite a healthy nest egg, too: Sesame Workshop reported a net worth of $356 million as of June 2011.

Via: The Foundry

Continue Reading...

The Actor Who Created Big Bird Makes About $314,000 a Year

Even Big Bird has to make some money. The Sesame Workshop's 990 form for the 2010 tax year reveals that Caroll Spinney, the man behind the newsworthy yellow guy and Oscar the Grouch, made $314,072. That's the most recent form available at Guidestar, which covers the tax year ended June 30, 2011. At MSN Jonathan Berr writes that Spinney's salary shows that "like for-profit media companies, Sesame needs to pay top dollar to attract talent." Spinney has played the bird since the show began in 1969, though others have stepped into the role at times.

For a comparison in the world of children's television, the girl who voiced Dora the Explorer (and became embroiled in a legal tangle with Nickelodeon) made about $300,000 over three years, TMZ reported in 2010. Spinney, however, is a long-term resident on Sesame Street. 

Big Bird made national headlines last week when presidential candidate Mitt Romney invoked the character's during the debate. Now, to Sesame's chagrin, the Obama campaign is trying to make votes out of Romney's pledge to cut PBS funding. But Big Bird has a greater villain than Mitt Romney, Berr says—for instance, his for-profit competitors like Dora. Berr writes that "competition for the preschool market is tough and getting harder," and Sesame has had losses and layoffs. 

Via: The Atlantic Wire 

Continue Reading...

Sesame Street Created '1.47' Jobs with $1M stimulus grant

This grant was brought to you by the letters “A” and “R” — as in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the “stimulus bill.”

Sesame Workshop, the independent nonprofit corporation that produces the popular childrens’ program Sesame Street, received a $1,067,532 stimulus bill grant in August 2010, via the Department of Health and Human Services.

The funding was to promote healthy eating according to the federal Recovery.gov website:

This grant was brought to you by the letters “A” and “R” — as in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the “stimulus bill.”

Sesame Workshop, the independent nonprofit corporation that produces the popular childrens’ program Sesame Street, received a $1,067,532 stimulus bill grant in August 2010, via the Department of Health and Human Services.

The funding was to promote healthy eating according to the federal Recovery.gov website:

SW [i.e., Sesame Workshop] will carry out an expansion of its highly successful Healthy Habits for Life initiative, which promotes improved nutrition and increased physical activity, targeting low-income preschool-aged children and their families and care providers.

The projected created “1.47″ new jobs, the website reported. How they could calculate this to a hundredth of a percent is anybody’s guess. In any event, that comes out to about $726,000 per job created.

The money is separate from the funds Sesame Workshop receives from the federally-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting to run the Sesame Street program on PBS stations.

The Recovery Act website lists the healthy eating project as more than 50 percent completed though most of the grant money appears to have been drawn.

Sesame Street has been in the news lately ever since Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said  last week that he would like to cut the funding PBS even though he likes Big Bird, a popular character on the show. The statement prompted a public comment from PBS criticizing Romney.

Via: Washington Examiner

Continue Reading... 

Desperate Dems Hide Behind Big Bird

by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012

Mitt Romney sure ruffled a lot of feathers over his proposal to eliminate taxpayer funding for government-sponsored TV. As soon as the GOP presidential candidate singled out PBS for cuts during the presidential debate in Denver, the hysterical squawking commenced.

Left-leaning celebrities immediately erupted on Twitter. “WOW!!! No PBS!! WTF how about cutting congress’s stuff leave big bird alone,” Whoopi Goldberg fumed. “Mitt is smirky, sweaty, indignant and smug with an unsettling hint of hysteria. And he wants to kill BIG BIRD,” actress Olivia Wilde despaired. “Who picks on Big Bird!!! #bulliesthatswho,” actress Taraji Henson chimed in.

Social media activists called for a Million Muppet March on the National Mall to “show your support for Big Bird, Muppets, PBS and all that is good.” The grammar-challenged operatives of George Soros-funded Media Matters for America lectured “right-wing media” to be “more concerned with Americans having jobs insteading (sic) of obsessing whether or not Big Bird has one.”

Indignant PBS, which employs not-so-neutral debate moderator Jim Lehrer, issued a statement decrying Romney’s failure to “understand the value the American people place on public broadcasting and the outstanding return on investment the system delivers to our nation.” And President Obama, awakened from his beatdown-induced stupor, scurried the next morning to the safe confines of a campaign rally to mock Romney for “getting tough on Big Bird.”

The kiddie character kerfuffle is a manufactured flap that may play well to liberals in Hollywood and Washington. But beyond the borders of La-La Land, desperate Democrats who cling childishly to archaic federal subsidies look like cartoonish buffoons. Let’s face it: The Save Big Bird brigade is comically out of touch with 21st-century realities.

Via: Michelle Malkin

Continue Reading...

Obama's Stephanie Cutter knocks Lehrer

DENVER, Colo. -- Obama spokesperson Stephanie Cutter took a swipe at moderator Jim Lehrer's largely passive debate performance tonight, saying the PBS anchor had allowed Mitt Romney to act as the moderator.

"I sometimes wondered if we even needed a moderator because we had Mitt Romney," Cutter told CNN shortly after the debate, though she told POLITICO that Lehrer did his job as moderator and that her comments were strictly about Romney.

(See also: Complete coverage of the Colorado presidential debate)

Cutter's decision to knock Lehrer may signal an acknowledgment by the Obama campaign that the president did not perform as well as his challenger, Mitt Romney -- which was the general consensus of the media, including the usually pro-Obama MSNBC. (MSNBC hosts Chris Matthews and Ed Schultz slammed Obama's performance.)

Many on the left criticized Lehrer for being too silent. He rarely interrupted the candidates when they went over their allotted time, and when he did it was almost always a losting battle. His attempts to control the conversation were so notably nonconfrontational that they became memorialized in a Twitter handle named @SilentJimLehrer.

But Lehrer's passivity also allowed the two candidates to engage one another, and if Obama did not engage Romney or land any singificant blows, he may have no one to blame but himself. Though it is the moderator's responsibility to keep time and keep the candidates on topic, it was up to the president -- not the moderator -- to take on his challenger. 

(Also on POLITICO: Lehrer: The master of moderation)

Nevertheless, reaction to Lehrer's passivity on Twitter was largely negative, ranging from the constructive to the cruel. "Moderator Jim Lehrer perhaps too laid back tonite," Lynn Sweet, the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote. "Jim Lehrer may be the worst moderator in the history of moderation," conservative columnist John Podhoretz wrote.

UPDATE (9:47 p.m.): Cutter emails:

"Jim Lehrer absolutely did his job as a moderator, as only Jim Lehrer can do. But Mitt Romney wanted to play by his own rules, and that came across loud and clear."

UPDATE (10:21 p.m.): Romney spokesperson: 'You've lost debate when you start blaming the moderator'

Via: Politico

Continue Reading...