CALL TO ACTION: "Completely for Sale" PBS Frontline, Columbia Journalism School Are Fleeing Accountability.
CALL TO ACTION: "Completely for Sale" PBS Frontline, Columbia Journalism School Are Fleeing Accountability.
It's Time to Stop Their Outright Corruption and Extreme Bias.
This piece is a call to action for every American taxpayer and journalist who reads it.
We need full accountability from taxpayer-funded PBS Frontline, as well as Columbia Journalism School, following the revelation—detailed in my recent American Thinker op-ed “PBS Frontline ‘Completely for Sale’” and in my in-depth NewSentry report —that Frontline engages in outright corrupt journalistic practices and is directly supported by Columbia Journalism School’s most senior leadership.
It has become clear that accountability will not be immediately forthcoming from PBS Frontline, which commandeers Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars for partisan bias and corruption.
Instead, senior leaders at both Frontline and Columbia Journalism School have effectively gone into hiding.
They’re apparently hoping for what should be impossible: Americans allowing outright corruption and fundamental lack of journalistic integrity to simply blow over, without any need to answer for it.
The action called for is the following:
- In addition to sharing this story with others via social media, Americans need to contact elected representatives who vote on government appropriations for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, through which Frontline receives taxpayer money.
- We can and should also bring this story to the attention of news outlets, including national publications, local newspapers, and others for wider coverage.
Compelling accountability from Frontline and Columbia Journalism School would be a righteous and monumental victory for journalism in the United States. It would be a game-changer that would make great strides toward leveling the media playing field.
The headline of the American Thinker piece derives from the observation made by Jeff Clark, U.S. Assistant Attorney General from 2018 to 2021, after reviewing details of Frontline’s outright corruption that I had brought to his attention, that “PBS’s Frontline is completely for sale.”
Since the time that the American Thinker piece was published (along with a longer-form Substack version), Dr. Peter Navarro, Director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy from 2017 to 2021, wrote that it is indeed “the truth about @frontlinepbs.”
On January 3rd, within hours of Dr. Navarro’s tweet, Steve Audette, the longtime Frontline editor who explicitly admitted to outright corrupt journalistic practices at Frontline, blocked his tweets from public view. In doing so, he followed Frontline executive producer and editor-in-chief Raney Aronson-Rath, who has also blocked her tweets from public view, as of at least December 29th.
The tweets of both Audette and Aronson-Rath had previously been viewable by the public. Alas, to quote Aronson-Rath herself, “Corruption doesn’t show its face.”
“Corruption doesn’t show its face.”
-PBS Frontline executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath
In early January, LinkedIn notified me that June Cross, the director of Columbia Journalism School’s documentary journalism program, viewed my LinkedIn profile, prompting me to send a message to Cross, who appeared with Aronson-Rath for a West Virginia University podcast interview recorded in September 2023.
My message to Cross read in part, “Do you have a response regarding the explicit, outright corruption at PBS Frontline under Aronson-Rath and your collaboration with Aronson-Rath and Frontline detailed in the [American Thinker and NewSentry] pieces?”
I publicly posted my message to Cross, but have received no response.
After I posted the news in a private LinkedIn group for Columbia Journalism School alumni (with thousands of members) of Audette and Aronson-Rath fleeing from public view on Twitter/X, a Columbia Journalism School alumnus named Juanita Ceballos, who has worked as an adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School and recently directed a Frontline documentary, “liked” my post. In the post, I asked, “Where are the responses from PBS Frontline and Columbia Journalism School?”
Seeing her “like” my post, I sent Ceballos a message, asking if she—as someone who has worked at both Frontline and Columbia Journalism School —would be willing to grant an interview. Shortly thereafter, her “like” of my post was undone.
I subsequently found out that Ceballos, who directed a Frontline documentary which aired this past December, had appeared with Aronson-Rath in a Frontline-produced podcast from January 4th, only days earlier.
Ironically, midway through the podcast, an announcer requesting monetary donations from listeners intones, “Join us in supporting journalism that holds our leaders accountable and pursues the truth, wherever it may lead.”
But it’s clear that the concept of holding its own leaders accountable is anathema to executives and staff at outright corrupt Frontline, as well as to faculty members at complicit Columbia Journalism School.
Referencing this, I asked Ceballos in the same LinkedIn group, “Are you going to make the difficult decision to do the right thing and help hold the leaders of Frontline and Columbia Journalism School accountable?”
Crickets. There has been no response from Ceballos.
In January, the writer and former Joe Biden supporter Sasha Stone—whom I describe in my Substack report—referenced the “‘well funded’ cabal to manipulate the media narrative” surrounding the 2020 presidential election. I responded to Stone, noting that “[Steve Audette] is a member of the well funded cabal, and has the yacht to prove it.”
Audette is recently retired after decades as an editor at Frontline, and is now sailing up and down the East Coast on a yacht called the SV Angelfish.
For Audette, corruption has paid well, so far.
Stone replied, “I totally get it—but Steve is my friend and I think everyone should be given a chance to change.”
Why the change of heart?
Stone wrote in a July 2023 piece, specifically referencing the 2021 Frontline documentary “American Insurrection" that Audette edited, “Is no one going to sue all of them for these blatant lies which really do meet the definition of defamation?”
And yet, with it now coming out that her self-described friend is party to the very same defamation, Stone seemingly no longer supports holding establishment media accountable.
Instead, Stone is choosing to support Audette and Frontline as they attempt to duck accountability.