The PBS Left and Right II

Craig Simmons made some rather odd personal attacks on me that merit correction (“The PBS Left and Right,” Counterpunch Letters, Sept. 2). In response to my call for more diversity in PBS documentaries (“Leftist PBS Needs Right Agenda,” Counterpunch, Aug. 26), he wrote that I believe “anyone who doesn’t toe the Republican Party line is un-American .” Simmons’ McCarthyite slur is silly and untrue. I called for opening PBS to more, not fewer, voices and ideas, and I’m a registered Libertarian who votes for neither Republicans nor Democrats.

He writes that I somehow want PBS reduced to “voice-over sloganeering accompanied with scantily clad, writhing female flesh.” Huh? In fact, thanks to the demagoguery of Bill Moyers (who in one recent week controlled 10 of 13 hours of PBS documentary air time) and the recent rerun of “I, Claudius,” PBS has ample amounts of both. My call was for an end to sloganeering and for the start of genuine diversity at PBS, for an end to its biased narrowcasting of only Looney Left, politically correct views.

Apparently Simmons fails to understand that, by law, PBS is required to provide “diversity . . . from diverse sources . . . with strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature”--Title 47 U.S. Code Section 396 (g)(1)(A).

Alas, I’m taxed to pay for PBS whether or not I watch and I’m allowed no democratic voice in shaping or participating in its programming.

PBS is the one public taxpayer-supported forum among the networks. You leftists have no right to shut diverse voices out, as you’ve done until now. Simmons now claims that Stalin and Castro are not leftists like him but are somehow right-wingers. As a self-professed lover of free speech, can Simmons see why it’s time for the monopoly control over PBS documentaries to end?

LOWELL PONTE

Carlsbad