May 25, 2005
PBS & NPR Are Under Attack:
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"
By Floyd Johnson
Ken Tomlinson was appointed to the Board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) by President Bill Clinton in 2000 and was named Chairman of the CPB by President Bush in September 2003. Tomlinson was a former editor at the staunchly conservative Reader's Digest and is a long time contributor to Republican causes. In December 2003, three months after being appointed CPB chairman, Tomlinson wrote a letter to the head of PBS, complaining, "Now With Bill Moyers does not contain anything approaching the balance the law requires for public broadcasting,"
The government-run, nonprofit CPB has traditionally had two roles - creating goodwill on Capitol Hill for public broadcasting and serving as a major funding source for PBS and NPR. The
Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 specifically
"prohibits interference by Federal officials over the content and distribution of public programming" and the application of any political litmus tests in hiring decisions. But with the appointment of Tomlinson, the CPB almost immediately turned its attention to overseeing PBS programming with heated allegations about liberal bias at PBS's 350 stations nationwide. Tomlinson made several moves to counter what he said was the lack of `objectivity and balance' at PBS.
Christy Carpenter, a former member of the CPB board says that after the arrival of Tomlinson, "the tone of the discussion became increasingly partisan. There was an agenda being pushed to bring in more conservative voices." Tomlinson hired two Ombudsmen to insure PBS programming is `fair and balanced.' He also hired White House communications officer, Mary Catherine Andrews, as a `special adviser' to oversee the two new Ombudsmen. Andrews helped draft the guidelines for the Ombudsmen's job while she was still working at the White House.
PBS airs hundreds of hours of programming every week, most of it educational and cultural, but Tomlinson's entire `fair and balanced' campaign appears to stem from a single weekly program, Now with Bill Moyers. "All they (the CPB board) talk about is the Moyers show," noted Christy Carpenter, the former board member. (See Bill Moyer's side of the story at: http://www.freepress.net/news/8120.)
After a flurry of high-profile personnel changes, suppressed polling data, and revised journalistic guidelines, PBS and the CPB are now doing battle over programming content and the allegations of liberal bias. One affiliate PBS station manager has dubbed Tomlinson's crusade for balance a "witch hunt." David Fanning, the executive producer of the award winning show Frontline, said Tomlinson's actions are, "designed to get people's attention and warn them not to do programming that will be questioned."
The truth is that the widespread `liberal bias' that many CPB board members are trying to fix simply does not exist. In an attempt to get public feedback, the CPB created Open to the Public, an interactive forum for viewers to express their concerns. For the calendar year 2003 (the latest year for which statistics are publicly available) the initiative produced 1,139 e-mails from viewers. According to the CPB, just 24 of those (roughly 2 percent) were angry e-mails about Now with Bill Moyers. Individual PBS stations may have logged additional complaints about Now, but the CPB's own feedback forum registered very little concern about the program. In addition, two new PBS viewer surveys were commissioned by Tomlinson, but he did not like the results and will not allow the survey findings to be published. Other surveys, however, have revealed that a healthy 80 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of public broadcasting. That a strong majority of Americans think PBS's news and information programming is more trustworthy and covers the news in greater depth than the major networks, Fox and CNN. That a viewer plurality of 48 percent think the government should provide more funding to PBS. (See PEW Research at: http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=215)
Individual PBS stations have long operated with their own strict codes of journalistic ethics. But last year, when it came time to renew its contract with PBS (with $29.5 million for network programming funding at stake), the CPB for the first time asked for a change in PBS journalistic guidelines. The CPB insisted that `objectivity and balance' standards must be an enforceable legal requirement in PBS's journalistic guidelines. PBS fought back. Claiming a First Amendment infringement, the CPB relented. But the CPB still demands that it have the right to approve the new PBS journalistic standards currently being updated by an independent panel of journalists and academics. This may be a problem. If the CPB objects to any portion of the new PBS standards, a very serious First Amendment legal confrontation will probably result.
Whether Ken Tomlinson is successful or not in imposing his control over PBS and NPR, it may make no difference. His much publicized efforts have already had a dampening effect on the coverage and analysis presented by these two public broadcasting outlets. Bill Moyers has left, the Now program has been cut to 30 minutes, and the CPB, in an unprecedented move, has funded the addition of two brand new conservative programs to the PBS lineup - The (Wall Street) Journal Editorial Report and Tucker Carlson Unfiltered. But if you are a working man, don't hold your breath waiting for the addition of a Labor This Week program to counter balance Washington Week (in Review). Perhaps Ken Tomlinson cynically knows that his mere attempt to impose CPB control over PBS and NPR will achieve the results he wants - heavy handed political influence on the programming content of PBS and NPR. This is wrong.
White House (i.e., Karl Rove, et al) interference with PBS programming is wrong. Partisan meddling with PBS is not only unwarranted, it is a serious threat to the Freedom of the Press.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"
(Afterword: If the President is seriously concerned about media bias, then let him first sort out the openly right wing bias of the Fox News Channel.)
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(See also "Making PBS Fair & Balanced as Fox" at: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/05/17/cpb_ombudsman_controversy/print.html)
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Floyd Johnson describes himself as a depression-born, unreconstructed FDR-Democrat. He moved to Phoenix from London in 1975 after residing several years in Brussels and London. He received a Masters Degree from Thunderbird - The Garvin School of International Management in Glendale, Arizona in 1981. After 35 years in the computer industry, he was a used and rare book seller in Peoria, Arizona until his retirement in 2002.
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