Sunday, May 11, 2008
Republicans have launched a heavy-handed campaign to correct public broadcasting's "liberal slant." There's just one problem: Most Americans don't think it has one.
May 10, 2005 | In the early 1970s a civil war erupted inside the fledgling world of public television. Upset with what they saw as its liberal news and public affairs programming, and particularly its tough coverage of the Vietnam War and the Watergate hearings, Nixon administration officials moved to rein in public television by stacking the board at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which acts as a governing body for the hundreds of local stations nationwide. The board then sought to control national programming decisions and curtail news programming.
"There were tremendous fights, with the Nixon Administration trying to prevent public television from doing any public affairs programming at all," former PBS president Lawrence Grossman once recalled to the New York Times. But Nixon's end run ultimately failed. In 1979, Newsweek quoted a PBS executive who insisted, "The war between CPB and PBS is over."
Today it's back on.
Amid a flurry of high-profile personnel changes, suppressed polling data, revised journalism guidelines, new oversight ground rules and deep suspicion, the CPB board -- once again under the control of White House-friendly Republicans -- and PBS are battling each other over content and allegations of PBS's liberal bias. The brawl is shaping up to make the Nixon-era dust-up seem tame by comparison: This weekend one PBS station manager dubbed CPB's crusade for "balance" a "witch hunt."
"It's designed to get people's attention and warn them not to do programming that will be questioned," says David Fanning, executive producer of "Frontline," PBS's award-winning investigative series. "We ask hard questions to people in power. That's anathema to some people in Washington these days."
"The situation is very concerning," says Christy Carpenter, a former Democrat-appointed member of the CPB board. She says that with the 2003 arrival of Republican CPB chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, "the tone of the discussion became increasingly partisan. There was an agenda being pushed to bring in more conservative voices. It's appropriate to have a wide spectrum, and I have no objection if conservative voices are in the mix. But I had the impression that more was being pursued than just balance."
Traditionally charged with a dual role as PBS's personal cheerleader (creating goodwill on Capitol Hill) and bank account (CPB serves as a crucial funding source), the government-run, nonprofit CPB has again, as in the Nixon era, turned its attention to overseeing PBS programming, insisting that the more than 300 PBS affiliates nationwide acknowledge that their programming suffers from a liberal bias.
The effort by Tomlinson and his allies at the CPB -- at least one of whom thinks producers should face "penalties" if their programming is deemed unbalanced -- echoes the cry of conservatives who for the past three decades have accused PBS of a liberal bias. (During the '70s it was referred to as an "Eastern elite" bias.) Although PBS, compared with commercial TV news outlets, probably does pose more pressing questions to those in power, its hallmark "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," for example, makes sure to include mainstream conservatives, such as New York Times columnist David Brooks, in its regular mix. The truth is that the widespread bias that board members are so eager to fix doesn't exist.
Tomlinson, a former editor at the staunchly conservative Reader's Digest who over the years has contributed exclusively to Republican politicians, was not available to comment for this story. But in April he told the Washington Post, "I am concerned about perceptions that not all parts of the political spectrum are reflected on public broadcasting."
Ernest Wilson, a Democrat-appointed CPB board member, agrees that fairness and balance represent "a genuine political concern" -- in part because "people who believe fairness and balance is a problem at PBS include some legislators on the Commerce Committee" (which oversees CPB funding). "But there are a myriad of other issues that are more important than fairness and balance. For instance, most of our PBS viewers are between the ages of 1 and 7 and 47 and 80, and there's nobody in between. That's a problem. And that's not a fairness and balance problem."
Asked if he thought the increasingly heated debate about objectivity had hijacked the CPB's larger agenda, Wilson said, "Yes, at the moment."
A CPB spokesman denies that the corporation has become distracted by the fairness and balance issue. "We're rolling up our sleeves and focusing on our core mission," says Eben Peck.
Yet it remains unclear what the evidence is for PBS's liberal bias. What are the egregious examples of so-called unfairness that are fueling the current controversy? Tomlinson himself rarely singles out any particular programming as being guilty of bias, or of not meeting public broadcasting's journalism standards. Rather than cite any actual infractions by PBS programs, Tomlinson has said he's concerned by the mere perception of a bias.
Last week he was quoted in Broadcasting and Cable magazine as saying he wanted to "broaden support for public broadcasting" while "eliminating the perception of political bias." And in response to a New York Times article last week on the tension between CPB and PBS, Tomlinson released a statement that read, in part, "Eliminating the perception of political bias ... is important to maintain continued public support for public broadcasting."
But the question remains, a perception of political bias by whom -- Republican politicians and conservative activists, or PBS viewers? If most PBS viewers and other Americans don't think the programming is biased -- and two internal polls prove they don't -- then why is the CPB unleashing this campaign?
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