KABC talk show host John Phillips has gone to war with PBS SoCal. Phillips, who also hosts on our sister site Next Generation TV, has discovered along with Flash Report that KOCE, the PBS TV affiliate in Southern California, has handed its investigative news operation to an operation called the Voice of Orange County. That outfit is funded, exclusively, by Big Labor and Democratic Party operatives.
According to IRS documents filed just last year, the Voice of OC is a non-profit organization that is supported by five donors. And low and behold, their major donor is the Orange County Employee Association, a public employee union based in Santa Ana. They donated $230,000 to the PBS news partner. The second largest donation, in the amount of $60,000, was made by a law firm founded by the former Chairman of the Democrat Foundation of Orange County, trail attorney Wylie Aitken. Three other smaller contributions were noted. (emphasis added)
Voice of Orange County peddled a fabricated story — a lewd smear campaign — about former Republican mayoral candidate Carl DeMaio, who was expected to run for mayor after the fall of serial sex abuser, Democrat Bob Filner. The purpose of the smear was apparently to prevent DeMaio from running for mayor again. The fabricated story made its way to all the usual suspects.
After the Voice of OC story, the report was picked up by publications such as the New York Post, TPM, the Huffington Post and Gawker, many mentioning the bizarre timing with the conclusion of the Filner scandal.
DeMaio passed a lie detector test on the matter. The VOC smear story comes from now state Democratic Sen. Ben Hueso, who claims that he saw DeMaio masturbating in a men’s room during a city council meeting when both were members of the San Diego city council in 2009. Hueso claims that another council member, then council President Tony Young, also witnessed. But Young says he never saw DeMaio do anything inappropriate. So we’re left with a hit job on a gay Republican, through the left-funded Voice of Orange County, using a single Democrat source. No responsible news agency would have published this, VOC reportedly shopped the story around but got no takers in the local medial.
Voice of OC is funded by the public unions that DeMaio opposed when he was on the San Diego council and would have opposed as mayor. He is a public employee pension reformer. It’s a classic instance of the politics of personal destruction.
It’s this outfit that KOCE, the taxpayer-funded PBS station on San Diego, uses for its “investigative news.”
Phillips had PBS SoCal CEO Mel Rogers on his radio show today, and grilled the PBS man about his station’s open association with the left’s smear artists. Audio of the interview is posted here. Phillips calls Rogers out for associating his public broadcasting station with known partisans, and incredibly, Rogers defends the association entirely.
PBS SoCal CEO Rogers inadvertently makes one of the best cases for de-funding PBS in years. He is so biased and unethical that he can’t even recognize facts or fairness anymore.
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