World Net Daily has published the first article that has appeared in response to Discovery’s press release yesterday about PBS station KNME banning Unlocking the Mystery of Life (UMOL).

The station now claims in a World Net Daily article that this was all just a scheduling mistake, which is laughable whenyou realize that they’ve been considering running this film since last spring.

You can see for yourself the ad that KNME itself designed and arranged to put in newspapers — then cancelled on Monday. You can also see the TV guide listings. Obviously, this program had been in process for some time (and they were well down the road of advertising and publicizing the show.

While we’ve yet to speak with the station’s program manager we are receiving reports that KNME’s guidelines don’t allow for a program that has been funded by any organization that has a religious affiliation or funds religious causes and that’s why this show is not acceptable. The question then is: was this a scheduling mistake or was this about concerns over the funding of the film?

What’s odd is that UMOL was acceptable for dozens of PBS stations around the country from Los Angeles to Miami to New York. And, it’s acceptable to be sold on PBS’s national website (though it appears that they’ve sold out since yesterday, imagine that), the network’s main retail outlet. And, it was acceptable for National Education Telecommunication Assoc. to upload it to their satallite making it available to PBS stations across the nation.

The film’s producers, Illustra Media, went through the vetting process with NETA, and they knew about the funding question even then and still decided to make the program available. KNME is hiding behind a policy that I’ll warrant they’ve ignored in past programming decisions when it fit their agenda to do so.