Tomorrow night, WHYY, an affiliate of PBS in Philadelphia, is slated to show a 35-minute original documentary entitled “The Surge: The Untold Story,” about the 2007 troop surge in Iraq. They were scheduled to run a live panel discussion with Liz Cheney afterwards. They cancelled it after one of the major donors to WHYY promised that if they showed the documentary, he’d stop giving them money and instead cut them out of his will ($200,000). Then he sent an email to the WHYY donors blabbing about a “Republican Takeover of WHYY.”
Why the hubbub? Because the film is produced by the Stevens and Schriefer Group and Red October Productions, two conservative film companies that have produced film for the Republican Party.
Sin of sins!
PBS is famously liberal. They feature leftist documentary after leftist documentary — but even a semblance of balance, and the left goes crazy. This is how they maintain their dominance in the film industry: through sheer and unrelenting whining and blacklisting.
Somehow, liberals in Hollywood have never had trouble finding distribution on PBS and other stations. Their open association with Democrats helps rather than hurts. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks didn’t worry about producing an election video for Barack Obama at the 2008 DNC. But do one video for Bush and all of a sudden, it’s fine for your programming to be scaled down by the powers-that-be at PBS.
Film should be judged on quality, not the identity of the creator. Anything less promotes the death of art itself — it promotes identity politics over art.
And that is unacceptable from any side.
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