The PBS Left and Right

Regarding “Leftist PBS Needs Right Agenda” (Counterpunch, Aug. 26): Lowell Ponte doesn’t like liberals. He thinks that we are trying to wrest control of corporate America’s lock on the media by presenting alternative perspectives on PBS. He is right about that.

There are many of us who are interested in what’s really happening in the world, contrary to what some major corporations want us to believe. There are many of us who question the integrity of powerful white men whose main concern is their personal ascendancy.

Ponte expresses his distaste for Bill Moyers in terminology that suggests a contempt far deeper than mere ideological opposition. His inclination toward vilification of liberals indicates that anyone who doesn’t toe the Republican Party line is un-American .

Ponte cites two examples of PBS’ leftist bent: documentaries on Stalin’s murderous behavior and Castro’s brutality toward gays, which PBS apparently was reluctant to run.

Most folks I associate with consider people who show brutal contempt for the starving and homeless or vicious disdain for the rights of gays and other minorities to be conservatives, not liberals.

Stalin and Castro are touted along with other totalitarian dictators as leftists. But any sincere examination of liberal and conservative philosophy easily dispels that simplistic conservative bromide. Absolute control is a very conservative tenet indeed.

Liberals are proponents of the rights of individuals, the freedom of speech, press, religion, due process of law and the right of women to make their own decisions as to their physical needs. Liberals defend minorities and the oppressed.

Conservatives are power brokers who stand for the rights of business over the individual and the environment, the limitation of individual freedoms, repression of personal expression, the establishment of a state religion, criminalization of abortion and the incarceration and execution of people based more upon convenience than guilt.

Ponte knows as well as the rest of us that the Big Three networks are owned and operated by very conservative companies. He knows that most Americans view the world through the narrow corporate perspectives presented on the network news.

But, much as in the Soviet Union, the control-oriented right is determined to limit our cultural input to sound bites and simplistic platitudes designed to instill our xenophobic leaders’ blind nationalism into our collective consciousness.

If Ponte misses voice-over sloganeering accompanied with scantily clad, writhing female flesh, he should tune in the networks and leave all that “socialist claptrap” to those of us in the “Looney Left” who enjoy the PBS alternative. It’s an easy and egalitarian maneuver. You just point the control box and push the button.

CRAIG SIMMONS

Van Nuys