Free Republic

PBS correspondent Jeffrey Brown explained “Mapplethorpe was best known for his homoerotic photographs and explicit sadomasochistic imagery, and the political and legal battles around them. Even now, we’ve chosen not to present his most controversial work.” But PBS didn’t just censor the art. They couldn’t even bring themselves to describe it. We’re not told about Mapplethorpe’s naked self-portrait with a bullwhip us his anus. We’re not told about his pornification of a little boy and a little girl. We’re not told about “Jim and Tom, Sausalito” – a photo in which one man urinates into another’s mouth. So when the...

‘Sesame Street’ Unveils Hijab-Clad Muppet: ‘Zari’ Is A Feminist From Afghanistan by Jerome Hudson 7 Apr 2016 Sesame Street unveiled a fresh face Thursday: a hijab-wearing Afghani Muppet named Zari who will teach kids about “girl empowerment, social and emotional wellbeing.” Zari will first appear in season five of Baghch-e-Simsim, which is the Afghan version of Sesame Street. The popular children show’s Twitter account was abuzz with Zari content Thursday.

Because the film contains so many blatant falsehoods and deceptive filmmaking techniques, Breitbart News is taking the unusual step of thoroughly debunking the movie and letting our readers know exactly what’s being lied about, and the impact it’s having.

If you were to draw a Venn diagram of two sets, with one representing male police officers and the other representing fans of “Downton Abbey,” I suspect the overlap would be vanishingly small. Some might consider this unmanly, but I’m proud to admit my membership in that sliver of humanity, and I will be a bit downcast Sunday evening as the show fades to black for the last time. Equally downcast will be Mrs. Dunphy, who perhaps represents a more typical demographic among the millions of people who today wonder how they will spend their wintertime Sunday evenings from now...

Here are more signs Sarah Palin could face an uphill battle with PBS host Gwen Ifill. Professor Sherrilyn Ifill of the University of Maryland Law School, whom Gwen Ifill has lauded as "my brilliant baby cousin," has written that black women are not buying Sarah Palin's "false claims to feminism" and is portrayed as too perfect: "when women who are privileged present as though they have it all together, it's offensive to black women." The Community Times, a suburban Maryland newspaper, found Professor Ifill was ardently opposed to the Alaska governor when they did an e-mail interview: "From the first...

Beyoncé didn't bring back the Black Panthers when she and an Afro-frizzed dance team donned black leather jackets and berets during Super Bowl 50's halftime show. That's because the Black Panthers never actually left. The Panthers were more than militants; they were pioneers in American pop and political culture. The Black Lives Matter movement, the rise of social media, music and sports, even Donald Trump -- all were shaped by the Panthers in some way, historians and ex-Panthers say. On the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, people are taking a second look at the group....

So let me get this straight: on the same day that the Washington Post reports that the State Department issued subpoenas to a family foundation bearing Hillary Clinton’s name as part of a federal investigation, the PBS debate moderators didn’t ask her about it.

Anyone have strong enough stomach and information junkie brain to dare watch with me?

PBS: Ted Cruz and His Father Are 'Satanic' (Video) New York Times columnist David Brooks said Sen. Ted Cruz's "dark and satanic tones" are now being copied elsewhere in the Republican primary. Appearing on PBS's Newshour this weekend, Brooks said, "Cruz is somehow beginning to get some momentum from Iowa and elsewhere. And so people are either mimicking him, which Rubio is doing a little by adopting some of the dark and satanic tones that Cruz has, and so -" At which point host Betsy Woodruff quickly interjected, "What did you just say?" "If you watch a Cruz speech,...

When I arrived in New York City 28 years ago to begin my national radio program, my objective was to have the most-listened-to show in the country. At that time, the national broadcast media included three television networks and CNN. That was it. There were 125 radio stations doing talk radio, and I started on 56 of them. No one had ever succeeded in syndicating a national daytime radio show, and I was predicted to fail, too. But I didn’t. What was different about my show was that I was the only conservative voice in national broadcast media. I was...

Rupert Murdoch just bought National Geographic. Here’s the problem everybody should be talking about. The media was up in arms yesterday at news of Murdoch's high-profile acquisition. Here's what you should know. The news that National Geographic has now been placed in the hands of Rupert Murdoch prompted a predictable outcry, roughly akin to what happens in the movies when the clearly evil tycoon takes the orphans away. A bastion of popular science is now controlled by a very prominent climate change denier who, despite his company’s assurances of editorial integrity, has spent decades interfering with the independence of his...

I’m the ombudsman at PBS and I don’t want to be glib or dash off something on Twitter that I would quickly regret, or that could easily be misunderstood, or could be used to either discredit me and my work or PBS. I had the same policy about pre-social media venues when I was the ombudsman at The Washington Post. So that brings me to the real self-inflicted wound, which was a tweet by PBS NewsHour co-anchor Gwen Ifill on Wednesday—after it became known that President Obama had secured the necessary number of Democratic backers in the Senate to ensure...

More Self-Inflicted Wounds By Michael GetlerSept. 2, 2015This column is not about me, but I start by acknowledging that I am something of a technological dinosaur. I still read printed newspapers and I don’t have a Twitter account or Facebook page. But the reason I don’t engage in social media is only in part because I’m a little challenged technologically. The real reason is that I’m the ombudsman at PBS and I don’t want to be glib or dash off something on Twitter that I would quickly regret, or that could easily be misunderstood, or could be used to...

Every time Republicans have threatened to end funding for the Public Broadcasting System and its radio cousin at National Public Radio, we all knew what to expect. Liberal supporters of the networks would trot out Big Bird, Elmo, Kermit, and the rest of the adorable “Sesame Street” gang of Muppets. Generations of Americans children have grown up with the PBS show. Rather than being forced to defend the indefensible notion of a taxpayer-funded government broadcasting system in the age of cable and the Internet, the argument instead turned into one about mean conservatives trying to pull the plug on a...

Sesame Street will be showing up on HBO first for the next five years. HBO will be financially backing Sesame Street for the next five seasons. The next season will see the show’s episodes reduced from one hour to a half-hour. The number of episodes in a season will increase from 18 to 35 as part of the deal, reports NBC News. Sesame Street fans that still look to watch the show on PBS can, but they’ll have to wait nine months after the episodes air on HBO for them to reach the network. Until then, PBS will be airing...

In never-before-released photographs taken on Sept. 11, 2001, the shock, horror and gravity of the terrorist attacks can be read on the faces of President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, their wives Laura and Lynne, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, CIA Director George Tenet and other senior Bush and Cheney staffers. The photos were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Colette Neirouz Hanna, coordinating producer for the Kirk Documentary Group, which covered the Bush administration in many films for FRONTLINE, including Bush’s War, Cheney’s Law and The Dark Side. The photographs, which were...

Wisconsin public broadcasters lost almost $1.6 million in state funding in the budget signed by Gov. Scott Walker July 12. The cuts affect two organizations, the University of Wisconsin-Extension and the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board, which support Wisconsin Public Television and Wisconsin Public Radio and provide other services. The ECB was hit hardest by state cuts, losing $1.1 million, while university-based support was reduced by about $460,000. The cut to ECB funds specifically targeted Wisconsin Media Lab, which curates free K-12 multimedia educational content tailored to the state’s academic standards. Lawmakers eliminated state funding for the program, which has a...

As we all remember, the media completely freaked out after the Supreme Court decided Citizens United in favor of free speech. Taking aim primarily at the right-leaning Koch Brothers, the media posed as defenders of democracy against the corrupting influence of outside money in politics. As usual, the facts prove that the media are big fat liars. Although legions of left-wing corporations like NBC News, Politico, MSNBC, CNN, CBS News, ABC News, The Washington Post, LA Times, NPR, PBS, Univision, Comedy Central, MTV, HBO, and ESPN spend billions of dollars pushing a political agenda 24/7, the left-wing media want a...

Ben Wattenberg died this week at the age of 81. He gave me my first job in Washington, as his research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. (I returned to AEI as a fellow a few years ago, my office just a few doors down from where Ben used to work.) Ben was one of the last star pundits of what might be called the Old Order, before cable news and the Internet transformed the landscape. When everyone was rushing to CNN to shout at each other on "Crossfire," he launched a PBS show called "Think...

The House and Senate Appropriations Committees this week approved $445 million in funding for CPB, but both proposals lacked earmarked funding of $40 million for PBS’s planned V6 Interconnection project. The Senate Appropriations Committee approved a bill Thursday that includes $445 million in advance funding for CPB and $25.7 million for PBS’s Ready to Learn program. The House Appropriations Committee approved its spending bill Wednesday. “The committee’s vote today represents an extraordinary endorsement of public television's work by both the Republican majority and the Democratic minority,” Association of Public Television Stations CEO Patrick Butler said in a prepared statement. “This...