Country Boys: PBS Exploits White Trash for Left-Wing Agenda

Country Boys, a three-part documentary by David Sutherland, is the newest Frontline special airing on PBS. It tells the story of two teenage boys, Chris and Cody, who are growing up poor in Eastern Kentucky. The film itself is real, gritty, and hard to look away from. It's everything a documentary should be. However, one look at its corresponding website on PBS.com and it is clear that this film is being used for a radical, left-wing agenda.

It's expected that the socially conscious (and government funded) PBS is going to be biased to the left. However, they go too far with the story of Chris and Cody. The film features a menagerie of toothless, lazy, backwoods country folk, feeding into every stereotype the world has for rural life. Sadly, the two boys in this film are depicted as the newest generation of this vicious poverty cycle. Although the film tries to end on a positive note, with the boys graduating high school, it is obvious that they will not go any farther than their parents before them.

Central to the story, other than the two boys themselves, is the government assistance everyone is living on. If anything,  this film is an example of a welfare system gone very wrong. Chris' father, a sickly alcoholic, is slowly drinking himself to death. His family talks about it casually and his father receives a monthly Social Security check  for his "disease" (the alcoholism!). How is being paid to drink an incentive to find help, get a job, and stop living on welfare? It isn't, of course. Never is there mention of a possible intervention for this man or any kind of government-implemented rehabilitation program. The monthly check might as well be a bullet in his head. (It is disclosed on the PBS site that Chris' father did die the following summer.)