PBS Adds Insult to Injury

"The far right's decades-long campaign to falsely brand PBS a leftist conspiracy - one that apparently included giving shows to such commies as William F. Buckley, Louis Rukeyser, Ben Wattenberg and Fortune magazine - has really hit pay dirt this year, first in creating a show around CNN's conservative talking head Tucker Carlson, and now, far more egregiously, in creating a program for the extremist editorial board of the Wall Street Journal," the Nation's Eric Alterman writes. "In a lengthy examination in the Columbia Journalism Review, Trudy Lieberman found six dozen examples of disputed Journal editorials and op-eds. She discovered that 'on subjects ranging from lawyers, judges, and product liability suits to campus and social issues, a strong America, and of course, economics, we found a consistent pattern of incorrect facts, ignored or incomplete facts, missing facts, uncorroborated facts.' In many of these cases, the editors refused to print a correction, preferring to allow the aggrieved party to write a letter to the editor, which would be printed much later, and then let the reader decide whose version appeared more credible. Almost never does the paper correct the record or admit its errors."