[PLUG-TALK] That's it. OPB has lost me for good!

[John Jason Jordan]

I have been a sustaining contributor to OPB for years, but I just
canceled, and I won't be back.

Ever since the Donald became president Judy Woodruff and company has
not missed an opportunity to present negative stories about him. And,
while other news services present positive views about the president, I
have yet to hear such on OPB. Mind you, the man is an ass of the first
water, and I would never vote for him, but is it wrong of me to want to
hear views that oppose my own? The job of a news commentator is not to
brainwash the public with the commentator's personal politics, but to
present all sides of the issues, especially the views that the
commentator does not agree with. I expect biased news reports from many
sources, but public broadcasting has a special duty of impartiality.

Losing Nightly Business Report was a blow and not OPB's fault. I liked
it when they replaced it with BBC world news for half an hour - at
least I got some real news. But for the past two days OPB has let the
Woodruff group preempt all other programming to present 24/7 coverage
of the impeachment trial - a trial whose outcome is a foregone
conclusion anyway. I had to stream internet radio to find out that 17
are now reported dead in Wuhan, and there is a victim already in
Seattle.

And while I'm at it, let me point out that on OPB the 'news' hour means
two or three sentences each about the major news events of the day,
followed by 45 minutes of documentaries that they have been preparing
for weeks in advance. It's not news. Tell us the truth and change the
name of the program to 'the documentaries hour.'

Just now I tried to find a BBC stream on the net, but I was not very
successful. In spite of my gigabit home connection I got to listen to
five or ten seconds followed by a couple minutes of waiting while the
stream caught up. Does anyone know of a way to get real world news from
outside the US? Is there an over the air station that has BBC? Or a
Russian news program? Or French? Or Iranian? Or anything that is real
world news? Why are we not using the internet to get non-U.S. views?

Apologies for the rant. My annoyance quotient has been sorely exceeded.
Now I'll go back to watching foreign movies.