Doug’s Dynamic Drivel

Well tonight was the first episode of PBS’ NOW since Bill Moyers retired. I’m disappointed. Gone are the interviews with key people where issues and ideas really got aired. Worse yet is the format is now only 30 minutes, hardly time to get into it and its over. David Brancaccio is OK but he’s no Bill Moyers. In the closing part of tonight he talked about US foreign aid and he mentioned how most Americans when asked figure that the US gives about 20% of its budget in foreign aid (an interesting fact in itself that cold fuel a whole program on how that impression aids the neocons) when in fact it is less than 1%

Less than 1 percent of the U.S. budget goes to foreign aid. President Bush’s 2003 budget proposes about $11.4 billion in economic assistance and about $4.3 billion for peacekeeping operations and to finance, train, and educate foreign armed forces.

Did Brancaccio follow up on that? No He mentioned that America ranks lower thasn other nations but then doesn’t give any examples for people to judge how much below. He just drops it there. He could have just grabbed one example - say Canada at .28% of GNP compared to the US’ .1% of GNP to illustrate his point, and Moyers would have, but he just let it drop.

I’ll continue to watch, but I’m very disappointed so far. Even the coverage on VIOXX wasn’t all that special. Informative and not pulling any punches but in the end there was no new inforation there that the networks hadn’t already covered fully. I’m used to NOW going where others feared to tread. For a first show this did no such thing and it is the show that should have started hte new season off with a bang. Sadly it it was more a party cracker than a firecracker.

I noticed there is now only one sponsor for the show. Interesting that all those previous foundation sponsors left as soon as Moyers did isn’t it.

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