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ANALYSIS/OPINION: By Oliver North October 16, 2017 Richard Nixon kept his promises, Ken Burns did not When Richard Nixon was in the White House, I was in Vietnam and he was my commander in chief. When I was on Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff, I had the opportunity to brief former President Nixon on numerous occasions and came to admire his analysis of current events, insights on world affairs and compassion for our troops. His preparation for any meeting or discussion was exhaustive. His thirst for information was unquenchable and his tolerance for fools was nonexistent. Mr. Nixon’s...

In a shock to no one, the liberal networks funded by taxpayers -- PBS and NPR -- have so far ignored the emerging new stories on the emerging new investigative stories on Russian involvement with the Clintons and the Obama administration. A Nexis search finds nothing there. PBS and NPR have hammered on Russia over the last two days, but only as it deals with the Trump angle. On Tuesday night's All Things Considered, NPR aired a four-minute interview with Yahoo reporter Michael Isikoff highlighting his finding that Russian social-media trolls were instructed to watch the overwrought TV series House...

ANALYSIS/OPINION: When Richard Nixon was in the White House, I was in Vietnam and he was my commander in chief. When I was on Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff, I had the opportunity to brief former President Nixon on numerous occasions and came to admire his analysis of current events, insights on world affairs and compassion for our troops. His preparation for any meeting or discussion was exhaustive. His thirst for information was unquenchable and his tolerance for fools was nonexistent. Mr. Nixon’s prosecution of the war in Southeast Asia is poorly told by Ken Burns in his new...

Steve Sherman and VVFFH are reviewing each episode, pointing out the falsehoods, misrepresentations, outright lies and propaganda as they come up. Here is a summary of the first episode: Segment One: (1945-1959) Fails to mention that Ho Chi Minh was a Comintern (Soviet) agent for nearly 20 years, not a nationalist as portrayed in the documentary. If he was a true nationalist, he would have worked with the other anti-French nationalists (VNQDD, Dai Viet, Catholic, Cao Dai, etc.) instead of betraying them to the French Surete to be imprisoned or killed. He also murdered many anti-French nationalists and Vietnamese patriots...

Many Americans’ moral vanity is expressed nowadays in their rage to disparage. They are incapable of measured judgments about past politics — about flawed historical figures who were forced by cascading circumstances to make difficult decisions on the basis of imperfect information. So, the nation now needs an example of how to calmly assess episodes fraught with passion and sorrow. An example arrives Sunday night. For ten nights on PBS, Ken Burns’s and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War, ten years in the making and 18 hours in length, tells the story of a war “begun in good faith by decent...

HARI SREENIVASAN: Hillary Clinton, she is one of the most prominent and polarizing figures in modern American history. This week, she is back in the spotlight promoting a new book. She opens up tonight to Judy Woodruff, revealing where she gives President Trump credit, but also her fears that he is dangerous for the world. Judy sat down with the former presidential candidate, secretary of state and first lady at the CORE: club in New York City, and began by asking about the premise of the book: What happened in the 2016 election? HILLARY CLINTON, Author, “What Happened”: I really...

In the ongoing debate about Confederate monuments, Slate has republished a 2011 article by professor James M. Lundberg attacking Ken Burns’ monumental “Civil War” documentary. Although he concludes with an appreciation of Burns’ achievement, he disapprovingly notes the series’ sentimental tone and points to problems such as its “tidy vision of national consensus,” being “deeply misleading and reductive,” and its “careful 15 minute portrait of slavery’s role in the coming of the war” being nearly negated by Shelby Foote’s 15-second anecdote about a “ragged Confederate who obviously didn’t own any slaves” telling his inquiring Union captors that he’s fighting “because...

The Hollywood Reporter unveiled that PBS and its public broadcasting brethren have written the Federal Communications Commission with a list of complaints. The headline reads, "PBS Wants the Government to Reexamine Hard Stance on Indecency." That's funny, since we haven't seen a "hard stance on indecency" since the Hays Code a half-century ago. And that wasn't even the government. Since then, liberals have successfully thwarted almost any effort to have the federal government enact broadcast decency rules, even those codified by the Supreme Court. By the time Barack Obama became president, all thoughts of regulation were abandoned. In 2012, midway...

Monday's PBS NewsHour spotlighted the low trust in the news media, according to the results of their latest poll. Only 30 percent of those surveyed by NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist trust the press "a good deal" or "a great amount." The Trump administration scored seven points better in the same poll. Guest Stuart Rothenberg bemoaned the "horrible trend" towards distrust of the media over the past several decades. NPR's Tamara Keith underlined that "these numbers are part of a very long trend of institutions losing trust from the American people; and that...puts America at risk."

Liberals made a big deal out of the report that Fox News has dropped its old slogan "Fair and Balanced." The liberal media always made a mockery out of it, rejecting it as "false balance." It's "false balance" because the conservative view is false. From their arrogant viewpoint, only the "truth" is worth reporting. That same worldview infects public broadcasting, which has been a left-wing propaganda project from its very beginnings in President Lyndon B. Johnson's days. They passed the Public Broadcasting Act with a meaningless rhetorical bow to fairness and balance, and liberals made sure any legislative teeth in...

The Independent Television Service (ITVS)--a federally funded film-making company, whose existence is mandated by federal law and which received more than $86 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting over the last five fiscal years on record—has produced a pro-sex-change documentary entitled “Real Boy.” The Public Broadcasting Service will broadcast the documentary on June 19. PBS itself has received more than $235 million from CPB over the last five fiscal years on record (2011 through 2015), according to CPB’s 990 forms. The ITVS documentary “Real Boy” tells the story of how a young woman--whose now-divorced parents named her Rachael--becomes Bennett,...

On Tuesday night, the leftish PBS documentary series Frontline aired a documentary titled “Bannon’s War” which seemed awfully reminscent of their anti-Cheney documentary suggestively titled “The Dark Side.” If you’re not a liberal PBS fanatic, it was another boring and predictable slog, attacking Bannon and Trump with lots of black and white photos and scary-sounding orchestral music. It was more eye-opening to see the Frontline director and writer Michael Kirk appearing on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal to promote his anti-Bannon film on Tuesday morning, where made a flat-out false statement about Bannon’s resume, saying “He’d never been in the military.” What?...

The liberal media are currently up in arms over President Trump’s labeling of the investigation into Russian hacking and the 2016 presidential campaign as a “witch hunt.” All three broadcast networks led their Thursday evening newscasts with Trump’s use of the phrase, with NBC’s Lester Holt describing Trump as “lashing out.”The liberal media are currently up in arms over President Trump’s labeling of the investigation into Russian hacking and the 2016 presidential campaign as a “witch hunt.” All three broadcast networks led their Thursday evening newscasts with Trump’s use of the phrase, with NBC’s Lester Holt describing Trump as “lashing...

Appearing as a guest on Monday's Tavis Smiley show on PBS, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof lamented that the media "truly wronged" Jimmy Carter and were "profoundly unfair" to him while he was President, due to "snobbishness" by the media. He also seemed happy to report that Hillary Clinton's personality has improved since her electoral loss, as the liberal columnist also recalled that she implicated "misogyny" in her loss when he met recently with the former Democratic candidate. Early in the interview, after host Smiley asked about a recent interview with former President Carter in which the topic of...

On April 5, The New York Times published an op-ed by retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal headlined "Save PBS. It Makes Us Safer." McChrystal now runs a big lobbying firm, so that may be why he cares so much -- he's a gun for hire. So how does the general think PBS makes us safer? And from what are we safer? The answer: commercialism. Parents like his son and daughter-in-law "are busy in the morning and busy at night," he says. "They want to protect their children from over-commercialized content." This argument is bizarre -- actually, let's call it what...

A PBS high school lesson plan encourages students to empathize with young Palestinian terrorists who want to become suicide bombers to achieve martyrdom and suggests they would rather die because Palestinians have less land and are restricted. The “Dying to Be a Martyr” multimedia lesson plan is available free of cost to teachers and students at PBS Learning Media, reports Justin Haskins at the Heartland Institute. It utilizes videos titled “Martyrdom,” “Suicide Bombing,” and “Israel and Palestine,” as well as internet sites and primary sources “to examine the roots of the Middle East conflict.” Students are asked to be able...

PRESS RELEASE: U.S. Department of Education Indoctrinates Students Into Islam Christian Action Network (CAN) has sent a “Letter of Demand” to the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) mandating that it cease its Islamic education program for the nation’s public schools. The DOE Islamic education program is currently being presented to the nation’s schools and teachers through the PBS LearningMedia website. If the conditions of its “Letter of Demand” are not met within 60 days, CAN will bring a federal lawsuit against the DOE challenging the constitutionality of the federally funded program. CAN is also issuing a “Letter of Demand” to...

The defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is long past overdue. No president, including Ronald Reagan, has seriously pushed an immediate winding down of this corrupt and outdated waste of taxpayer funds. Who would have ever imagined that Donald Trump would be the first to do it? His first budget proposal takes that step, not just to save of ton of taxpayer money ($450 million is a lot of money) but also to establish a principle about our leftist media. It's simply not appropriate for the federal government to fund Democrat propaganda badly disguised as news. Is it any...

As night follows day, defenders of big government trotted out "Sesame Street's" Big Bird as the poster child of President Trump's terrible spending cuts. The Daily Beast story on Trump's budget proposal to cut taxpayer funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting features an ax-wielding man about to chop Big Bird's head off. Politico has a story titled "Can Big Bird Survive Trump?" In a "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" segment mocking Trump's budget, Donald Trump fires Big Bird. These folks would do well to find a new mascot. Big Bird is big business, and doesn't need taxpayer money to survive. First,...

President Donald Trump made good on a long-time conservative goal in his first proposed budget Thursday morning, targeting the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities for complete elimination. Trump’s budget would zero out the $445 million budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a substantial source of funding for programming and broadcast operations on public TV stations and NPR radio stations nationwide, per the Washington Post. The budget would also eliminate the budgets for both national endowments, which stood at $148 million each in 2016, as well as $230 million for the Institute...