Roger Chesley’s Vanity Train Stops

If you want to know what’s wrong with “public broadcasting” you need read not further than Roger Chesley’s plaintive bleat about his show being cut from the local public TV station’s lineup.

I am a news junkie but I have never heard of "Another View." Based on Chesley’s description, it was another opportunity for ethnic naval gazing:   "Hosted by Barbara Hamm Lee, the lively debates cover issues affecting African Americans nationally and in Hampton Roads."

Hey, Roger, the biggest issue affecting African Americans nationally and in Hampton Roads is unemployment.    You're welcome.

Governor Bob McDonnell decided that there were more important things that $370,000 of the public’s money can be used for than providing a self-gratifying ego boost to underemployed columnists. "In today's free market, with hundreds of radio and television programs, government should not be subsidizing one particular group of stations." For some reason, Chesley does not agree. The rest of us do; in fact this move is long overdue.

In a truly pathetic comment, Chesley accuses the governor of acting politically. McDonnell's ax-wielding endears him to his conservative base, and it will burnish his bona fides with the Republican Party. The GOP has long claimed that public broadcasting, especially on a national level, has a liberal bias. Well, if by that Chesley – a flaming Liberal – means that cutting public funding from an organization that works diligently to undermine the Moderate/Conservative end of the political spectrum is political, I guess I’m going to have to give him that one. Of course that’s where the country is and Chesley isn’t.

It would seem that the kind of programming that puts Chesley on the air – even if no one watches – would be able to get support from the wealthy in the press, academia, the arts and Hollywood. But no, Chesley wants to have the lights go on and the cameras roll so that he and his friends can “wade… into controversial issues” have a gabfest funded by the shrinking income of the working people of the state.

One final ironic point about Chesley’s column; he inadvertently reveals that one of the key complaints by the head of the local public broadcast system is a lie. “Bert Schmidt, president and CEO of WHRO, has said there's "not one penny of PBS funding being reduced through this veto. What's being cut is services to Hampton Roads schools." What were actually cut were vanity programs that no one would voluntarily watch, unless they were assigned as homework.