Cool Motorcycles, Conservatives, and PBS

There seems to be a lot of news floating around this week about public broadcasting. Paul Farhi has an article today pointing to a recent series of controversies involving political correctness (as well as the odd appointment of two ombudsmen for the first time).

Farhi concludes “Some observers, including people inside the Public Broadcasting Service, see these recent developments as troubling. PBS, they say, is being forced to toe a more conservative line in its programming by the Republican-dominated agency that provides about $30 million in federal funds to the Alexandria-based service.”

In a related-and-yet-not story, this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine features an interview with the new chief of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, Ken Ferree, who took the reins suddenly when the organization axed/fired/”declined to renew the contract of” longtime exec Kathleen Cox.

Ferree, as Farhi tells us, is “a Republican who had been a top adviser to Michael Powell, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.”

We learn from the interview that Ferree doesn’t watch much public broadcasting (On the Lehrer NewsHour: “It’s slow. I don’t always want to sit down and read Shakespeare, and Lehrer is akin to Shakespeare. Sometimes I really just want a People magazine…”), or public radio (because he commutes to work on a motorcycle “stripped down deliberately to look cool, and I don’t want all that electronic gear.”).

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