PBS BRASS CAN’T FIND SPINE, SELF-CENSORED FREE SPEECH DOCUMENTARY BECAUSE OF TRUMP
The last time PBS was in the news was when we heard that the Trump administration wanted to end it, which really means they wanted to cancel actual culture while playing the victim. Sure, that’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to white conservatism these days. Fortunately, the DOGE dogs couldn’t immediately catch the PBS tailpipe, and I stopped assuming the worst. But here we go again, except with more painful irony and not an existential threat to PBS itself. Well, maybe its soul, which could be worse. Because now the news is that PBS has censored itself, in a documentary about free speech, no less. Why? Trump, of course.
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FREE SPEECH DOC IS ABOUT ART SPIEGELMAN, WHO BRIEFLY CRITICIZED TRUMP IN PUBLIC, ONCE
The free speech doc is Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse (2024). Art Spiegelman, of course, is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus. Even if you haven’t read Maus, you recognize its cover when you see it. There’s a reason Spiegelman won the Pulitzer, after all. And the documentary must be amazing as a result, just because. But PBS has self-censored a 90-second clip that shows Spiegelman speaking at a public event, reading out loud from a few comic panels he drew for the 2017 Women’s March newspaper. Well, and he talked a little bit about Trump, too.
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PBS THINKS OFFENDING TRUMP IS TOO RISKY, AND NOW FREE SPEECH IS A BIT TOO RISQUE
And that’s exactly what PBS pulled from the documentary. It seems the higher-ups there felt that angering the head of MAGA is just too risky. Which means that free speech about free speech is now risqué. So what did Spiegelman even say? Just this: “I resisted drawing Trump’s smug and ugly mug till now because narcissists thrive even on negative attention. I hoped he would just burn out, but now he’s got his grubby little mitts on the steering wheel and seems set to drive us all off a cliff.” And that’s where we are today with PBS, which has censored a documentary about a free speech advocate, in his own words.
I sure hope we see some great comic panels about PBS’s brass, and soon.
