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发帖数: 6571 | 1 November 29, 2016
Guess how much a CEO at PBS makes
By John Dietrich
One of the reasons progressives are in panic mode is because many of their
favorite programs are in jeopardy. These programs consume hundreds of
billions of dollars. Their numbers increase with time, and efforts to
eliminate them have been unsuccessful. With Republican control of both
houses of Congress and a businessman as chief executive, this seemingly
impossible task is within reach.
National Public Radio (NPR) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB
) are not-for-profit organizations. What could be better than that? They
belong to the public, and they are nonprofit. They are high-priority
government programs. During the 2013 government "shutdown," NPR was
provided with $445 million while funds for clinical cancer trials under the
National Institutes of Health were cut. This was the shutdown where
reporter Dana Bash asked Senator Harry Reid, "If you can help one child, why
won't you do it?" Reid responded, "Why, why, why would we want to do that?
" Reid criticized Bash: "To have someone of your intelligence suggest such
a thing maybe means you're as irresponsible and reckless."
Reid is a powerful patron of the arts. He called H.R. 1, a bill to
eliminate the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of
the Arts, a "mean-spirited bill." He gave these organizations credit for
the cowboy poetry festival held every January in northern Nevada. He
claimed, "Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people
who come there every year would not exist."
A premier PBS station is WGBH, which produces more than two thirds of the
nationally distributed programs broadcast by PBS. Several years ago, the
Boston Herald published an article about executives' pay at the station.
The Herald claimed that the "executives were raking in upwards of $200,000 a
year while toiling in the lap of a luxurious $85 million multimedia palace
dubbed the 'Taj Mahal.'" Their headquarters contained a 200-seat
amphitheater, a state-of-the-art recording studio, a Hamburg-Steinway grand
piano, environmentally friendly dual-flush toilets, and waterless urinals.
The Herald reported that WGBH's CEO, Jonathan Abbott, received $425,000 a
year.
Abbott defended the salaries, saying WGBH has to compete for talent with the
country's leading media companies. He is perfectly correct. There is a
market for talent. WGBH has to pay a competitive rate in order to attract
the talent it needs. Without talent, it will lose viewers. If a private
company loses business, it improves its product or goes under. Government-
subsidized companies still must perform; however, the incentive is not as
urgent as it would be in a private company. And why should people who cling
to their Bibles and guns subsidize a corporation that does not have a very
high opinion of them?
NPR is sensitive about criticism of people's religious beliefs. Juan
Williams was fired by NPR for admitting he gets nervous on a plane when he
sees a person dressed in Muslim garb. Somehow they overlooked Andrei
Codrescu's statement on his program All Things Considered: "The evaporation
of four million [people] who believe in this [Christian] crap would leave
this world a better place." This was also the view of NPR's former senior
vice president for fundraising, Ron Schiller. He told a couple of
undercover journalists that "NPR would be better off in the long run without
federal funding." Shortly after that interview, he left NPR under a cloud
for claiming that "Tea Party people" aren't "just Islamaphobic, but really
xenophobic – I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white,
middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it's scary. They're seriously racist,
racist people."
The article claimed that the station's "freewheeling spending" put it in the
crosshairs of congressional Republicans. Government funding relies to a
large extent on Democratic support. Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) told the
Herald, "We know that they can survive on their own. It's time to push Big
Bird out of the nest and let him fly on his own."
NPR reportedly gets only about 10% of its budget from the federal government
. However, if the network's people are informed that the government is
going to defund them, you will hear a sound similar to what you will hear if
you throw a box of day-old donuts into a pen of piglets.
It is a glorious sound. Better than the smell of napalm in the morning.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/11/guess_how_much_a_ceo_at_pbs_makes.html#ixzz4RPVV4CMT
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