by Jack Cashill, ©1999
News Talk 980 KMBZ
Posted on Cashill Newsletter
July 16, 1999*

WGBH-TV, Boston's publicly funded station, has been swapping names of contributors with the Democratic Party since 1994, handing over a total of more than 32,000 names despite clear prohibitions against tax-exempt groups engaging in political acts, the BOSTON GLOBE reporteed on Thursday.

Republican House members are now calling for a criminal investigation of the station. But do they understand what the real scandal is?

"By Wednesday night, the entire system of public broadcasting had been thrown into jeopardy, as the allegations of wrongdoing appeared much worse than initially thought," reports the paper's Anne Kornblut.

Now, who finds that hard to believe? Democrats cheating the American public out of a fair campaign? Democrats violating EXISTING campaign finance laws? Can't be! This is the same party that Hillary Clinton belongs to. You remember Hillary. The woman who hired Craig Livingstone and walked all over the privacy rights of more than 900 Republicans by misappropriating their private FBI files. And the party of husband Bill, the guy who never met a campaign law he couldn't break.

I wonder if there was "no controlling legal authority" in this matter. I wonder if these alleged violations will be minimized by libs as they dig up some poor associate of Bob Dole who once violated a campaign finance law or another. I wonder if this story will ever find its way onto network news broadcasts. Janet Reno will be up all night trying to figure out how she won't investigate this one.

Scandal? What scandal?

But Janet doesn't know what the real scandal is either, and it is this: How were the Dems able to assueme that the PBS list would be so utterly Democrat-friendly? By charter, PBS is non-partisan.

But the Democrats knew what their spokespeople have always denied: PBS slants so far left it's almost supine. It has alienated the conservative base. It has created a reserve for tender-hearted liberals to shield them from reason and reality. To Democrats, it's just using what they probably feel is rightfully theirs. Besides, if Unions can take money from their Republican members and spend it on Democrats without asking, why can't WGBH-TV do the same?

That is if PBS has any Republican viewers.