Opinion

Beantown poster child for PBS excess

BOSTON If the congressional Republicans trying to defund National Public Radio still need a poster child, they need look no further than WGBH — grown fat, happy and politically correct off the backs of the American taxpayer.

GBH is the Public Broadcasting System’s largest producer. TV-side, its showcase series include “Nova,” “Arthur,” “Antiques Roadshow” and “Frontline.” The station promotes its lavishly funded schedule on a massive $5 million state-of-the-art electronic billboard that protrudes over the Massachusetts Turnpike — one day touting a special on endangered sea mammals, the next a “scathing” documentary on some Republican who usually turns out to be Dick Cheney.

But lately the “nonprofit” TV-radio behemoth finds itself confronting a few inconvenient truths, as their hero Al Gore might put it:

* Its four-year-old headquarters in the city’s old Brighton stockyards district cost $85 million to build. In the years since it has moved in, GBH has paid exactly

zero to the city of Boston in property taxes or their equivalent.

* More than a dozen GBH honchos make more than $200,000 a year.

* Despite the liberals’ mantra that federal grants are but a small part of its bigger stations’ budgets, GBH has in fact grabbed more than $80 million from Uncle Sam in just the last six years.

* Last week, more than 100 members of GBH’s largest union staged a noisy demonstration outside the “Taj Mahal,” as the headquarters is sometimes called. Their complaint: GBH wants to outsource their jobs to nonunionized competitors.

In short, while GBH talks a good liberal game — the Taj Mahal, it boasts, is “LEED-certified by the US Green Building Council” — its cutthroat crony capitalism puts Halliburton to shame.

Full disclosure: In 1989 I briefly worked as a freelancer for GBH-TV’s nightly newscast — until the Boston Globe crowd pushed their bow-tied broadcast cousins into firing me. (So much for celebrating diversity.) Plus, I host a daily talk-radio show — and GBH jumped into the talk biz a few years back.

Traditionally, public broadcasting tried to fill the gaps left by the for-profits — on radio, providing a lot of jazz and classical music. But then Boston University’s station, WBUR, realized how much money could be generated running radical-chic newscasts that appeal to the region’s trust-funded, pony-tailed Baby Boomers. Soon BUR was the dominant “public” radio station in New England.

What was WGBH to do? Flush with cash as always, it paid $15 million for a weak-signaled commercial FM station and unceremoniously dumped its venerable classical-music format there. Meanwhile, in prime-radio time, WGBH went all-Bush Derangement Syndrome, all the time.

Give it credit for some political smarts: GBH has reinvented the old hippy slogan — think globally but make no waves locally. On Saturday, after the state’s liberal Democratic governor returned from a disastrous foreign junket, the GBH Web site unabashedly proclaimed “A Bravura Performance by Gov. Patrick.”

But the latest controversies finally have the sacred cow in hot water. How bitter, especially, that the Boston Herald has outted the sanctimonious outfit as the city’s biggest property-tax deadbeat.

WGBH’s free ride angers many even in a liberal city, where annual property taxes on a simple one-bedroom Back Bay condo on the wrong side of Mass Ave. can run upward of $10,000 a year.

City Council President Steve Murphy, a conservative Democrat, summed it up: “They’re getting public money — so that should really wipe away your tax exemption. You can’t have it both ways, and it seems to me they’re having it both ways.”

Meanwhile, WGBH fitfully tries to reach out to its non-fans, the people who don’t believe 9/11 was an inside job. It even added a business page on its Web site. Saturday’s lead story: “Valerie Plame Wilson to Author Suspense Books.”

In other words, more BDS. It’s the only formula NPR knows.

Howie Carr is a columnist for The Boston Herald.