P. BS.

What happened to the PBS NewsHour?

The PBS NewsHour, the only commercial-free television news program in the United States, is supposed to be more serious than the commercial network newscasts, who are supposedly kowtowing to the bottom line while PBS delivers the news that matters free from worrying about profits (forget for a moment the corporations that have been "underwriters" of the PBS NewsHour or decades).  Don't you believe it.

This past Tuesday night's broadcast of the PBS NewsHour demonstrated how less serious the broadcast has become, though there are earlier examples I will refer to later.  Among the stories it reported last night was a charity group of transvestites in Los Angeles who dress in nun's habits and wear whiteface, called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who were invited to a gay pride event by the Los Angeles Dodgers, disinvited by the Dodgers after Catholic groups complained about how they were offended by the group, then re-invited by the Dodgers when ay-rights groups complained.  Okay,  maybe it was in bad form for the Dodgers to disinvite the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and I'm sure the Sisters mean no offense toward Catholics.  But when Stephanie Sy, who interviewed sportswriter L.Z. Granderson for the story and asked him about the offended Catholics, Granderson just shrugged it off:  

[W]hen it comes specifically to religious ideology and imagery, you can go back to Rosemary's Baby in the 1970s, and I believe the Catholic Church was upset about that. You can go back to Madonna and "Papa Don't Preach," and they were upset in the '80s about that. And so there's been consistent examples in which people have used religion imagery to try to have a cultural moment, maybe a satirical moment, and that people of that faith have been offended by it. This is not unique to the Sisters. This is not unique to the Dodgers. This is something that we have witnessed in this culture for many decades.

So, offending Catholics (unlike offending Jews and Muslims) is no big deal.  Oh, all right.

And Stephanie Sy, who's normally a serious woman, talked about the Dodgers "striking out" by disinviting the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for their "original sin."  What is this, MTV News?

And why was this story even reported on the PBS NewsHour?  Threats to non-heterosexual liberty far worse than this go on all the time, and they're doing stories like this?

On the same show, arts reporter Jeffrey Brown did a story about an artist whose art is apparently putting things next to other things - the sort of art children can do, which is becoming too frequent in Brown's reports.  Also, substitute anchor William Brangham trivialized the debt ceiling debate that's about to blow up in everyone's faces by saying that amount owed by the federal government would make thirteen piles of $100 bills as tall as the Washington Monument, while Capitol Hill correspondent Lisa Desjardins used barbells to explain the interest on the debt.  

Such silliness has been going on for years now.  Where Judy Woodruff used to sign off making an offhand comment about the last (and least important) news story of the evening (which was annoying enough), new anchors Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz joke or banter about whatever the last news story of the evening before signing off like they're anchors of a local-news program in Des Moines or Sioux Falls. Sometimes they address their audience personally, like when Amna Nawaz said that a pet-adoption story that had just aired made her want to adopt a pet in addition to the three pets she and her husband already had, followed by her saying, "Just kidding, honey." 

And of course, obituaries of many famous people are ignored for not being "passings of note."  For those  new to this blog who only get their news from PBS, we lost two power-trio drummers - Cream's Ginger Baker in 2019 and Rush's Neil Peart in 2020 - but the PBS NewsHour never bothered to report either passing.  Ansd while Tom Hanks and Bob Newhart will of course be memorialized on the PBS NewsHour when they die, Peter Scolari, who worked with both actors on television, died in 2021 without the NewsHour mentioning him.  And in September 2022 - about two weeks after Queen Elizabeth's death - former New Jersey governor Jim Florio died without the NewsHour reporting it.  This has to be a joke, I thought, channeling Molly Ringwald's Samantha Baker from Sixteen Candles.  The PBS NewsHour failing to report a politician's death?  They live for that stuff!  The PBS NewsHour has reported the deaths of back-bench U.S. House members and forgotten one-term U.S. Senators, but it couldn't acknowledge the death of a former Governor of New Jersey? 

Needless to say, I'm getting tired of TV news, as it's not as sober and serious as it used to be, so perhaps I should subscribe to a newspaper to get my news, before all of the newspapers go away.  Because if you can't rely on the PBS NewsHour, who can you rely on?