The Attempt To Control The Media.

In this case it was successful, the governor got a reporter fired!

Reporter's dismissal exposes political pressures on West Virginia Public Broadcasting
NPR Heard on Morning Edition
By David Folkenflik
February 13, 2023


Late last fall, West Virginia Public Broadcasting's Amelia Ferrell Knisely reported one story after another about allegations that people with disabilities were abused in facilities run by the state.

The state agency Knisely was covering demanded that one of her key stories be fully retracted. While her coverage remains on West Virginia Public Broadcasting's website, Knisely is gone. She says she was told the decision came from the station's chief executive.

Interviews with 20 people with direct knowledge of events at West Virginia Public Broadcasting indicate Knisely's involuntary departure from her position as a part-time reporter was not an aberration but part of a years-long pattern of mounting pressure on the station from Gov. Jim Justice's administration and some state legislators.

"We all knew that our jobs could go at any moment if politicians fought that hard enough," says former West Virginia Public Broadcasting reporter and producer Roxy Todd. "Gov. Justice's presence was always looming over us."

Since 2017, politicians have sought to eliminate state funding. The governor appointed partisans hostile to public broadcasting to key oversight positions. And the station's chief executive has intervened repeatedly in journalistic decisions.

Why is it that only the Republicans systematically attack the media?

Trump was the king of barring reporters from media sources he didn’t like, the Guardian reported,

The White House barred several news organizations from an off-camera press briefing on Friday, handpicking a select group of reporters that included a number of conservative outlets friendly toward Donald Trump.

[…]

Outlets seeking to gain entry whose requests were denied included the Guardian, the New York Times, Politico, CNN, BuzzFeed, the BBC, the Daily Mail and others. Conservative publications such as Breitbart News, the One America News Network and the Washington Times were allowed into the meeting, as well as TV networks CBS, NBC, Fox and ABC. The Associated Press and Time were invited but boycotted the briefing.

The decision to limit access to Spicer, hours after Trump once again declared that much of the media was “the enemy of the American people” while speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, marked a dramatic shift.

Other presidents have banned news outlets but most of those banded were because of behavior and not their ideology.

The NPR article went on to write…

West Virginia Public Broadcasting was troubled before Antolini arrived in 2021, having been roiled by allegations of favoritism under the previous CEO. And the state's dominant newspaper is embroiled in its own journalistic controversy. Meanwhile, the state has become increasingly conservative; Republicans, many of whom are skeptical of public broadcasting, now hold a supermajority in the legislature. Many of the people who spoke to NPR say they worry that state lawmakers or the governor will use the current crisis as a reason to slash West Virginia Public Broadcasting's funding.

When they hold the purse strings they can tell you to STFU!

Instead of being at the mercy of advertisers the are at the mercy of politicians!

Once in office in early 2017, Justice sought to jettison all state funding for West Virginia Public Broadcasting. That would have caused the station to shut down, state public broadcasting officials said at the time.

After a significant public outcry, Justice relented. Yet state legislators still cut West Virginia Public Broadcasting's state funding by nearly a quarter, roughly $1 million.

And I asked you, which political party is always threatening to cut the funding to PBS?

~~~

I usually watch PBS Newshour, BBC Nightly News, and German news program on my local PBS station.