The findings likely come as little surprise to CPB officials, who obviously pored over results from a 2003 survey on liberal bias conducted jointly by a Republican and a Democratic firm. (The firms later hosted focus groups in red states, inviting only people who had complained about a liberal bias at PBS, so they could further detail their complaints.) As the "Research Objectives" portion of the results states, the survey's top priority was to "re-measure the extent to which people view news and information programming on PBS and NPR as being biased" (emphasis added).

Why "re-measure"? Because, according to public television insiders, the first batch of polling done in 2002 produced unsatisfactory results from the CPB board's perspective; it showed little viewer concern about bias. "Tomlinson commissioned two polls. The first results were too good, and he didn't believe them," says one source. "After the Iraq war, the board commissioned another round of polling, and they thought they'd get worse results." But the board didn't. Asked specifically about PBS's war coverage, only 7 percent of respondents thought it was "slanted." "They couldn't use any of it" to bolster any claims of bias, says the source. Overall, just 21 percent of respondents thought PBS was too liberal.

Of course, if Tomlinson and his colleagues were looking for good news about PBS instead of bad, the wider poll results -- a healthy 80 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of public broadcasting -- would have been trumpeted as a triumph. (In an NPR interview aired last weekend, Tomlinson suggested that that 80 percent should be higher.) Meanwhile, a strong majority thinks PBS's news and information programming is more trustworthy, and more in-depth, than that of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN. Most viewers think PBS is a "valuable cultural resource," and a plurality of 48 percent want the government to provide more funding to PBS. (Only 10 percent want it to provide less.) But despite the good news, the CPB board refused to tout these results or even release them independently.

Says Democratic CPB board member Wilson, "It's very important that the American public see these polls. They were paid for with public money and should be seen." Asked about any discussion the board had about the polls and releasing them widely to the public, Wilson says, "I'm not going to talk about what happens in the board meetings."

It should be noted that the polling firms did report "a disparity between Republicans and Democrats with respect to their views towards news and information programming on public broadcasting." They're likely referring to the finding that 36 percent of Republicans think PBS has a liberal bias, compared with 21 percent of all respondents.

But Republicans' complaints about PBS bias are consistent with how they view most mainstream news organizations. According to one of the most comprehensive surveys on public opinion about the media, conducted in 1997 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Republicans "are more likely to say news organizations favor one side than are Democrats or independents." In that survey, 77 percent of Republicans thought the press was biased, compared with 58 percent of Democrats. In other words, polls are likely to find about far more Republicans complaining about bias no matter which media outlet is being analyzed.

Despite its own polling showing that bias was not a concern perceived by most Americans, the CPB pressed ahead with its aggressive plans to fix the problem. At her 2003 Senate confirmation hearing, Republican CPB board member (and major GOP fundraiser) Cheryl Halpern not only suggested that producers be penalized for any programming deemed to be biased but also demanded that PBS operate under an "objective, balanced code of journalistic ethics, [which] has got to prevail across the board, and there needs to be accountability."

The truth is, PBS stations have operated under a strict code of journalistic ethics for decades. But late last year, as part of its contract renewal with PBS, which earmarks $29.5 million for the network in programming funds, CPB for the first time asked for a change in PBS's journalism guidelines. For the previous 14 years of the multimillion-dollar contract, CPB had relied on PBS to operate under its own well-established journalism standards. According to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which established the CPB, the corporation must meet several goals. One is ensuring a "strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature." The CPB instead moved to introduce statutory language making "objectivity and balance" guidelines an enforceable legal requirement.

PBS balked. Claiming a First Amendment infringement and an unprecedented attempt by the CPB to assert direct control over its broadcasting, the network's attorneys noted that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia had previously ruled that the "objectivity and balance" provision from the '67 Act "is not a substantive standard, legally enforceable by agencies or courts." The CPB relented, but still wants to OK PBS's journalism standards, which are in the process of being updated by a panel of journalists and academics. If the CPB objects to portions of those standards, that could spark yet another showdown.

"I think the goal is to change the kind of journalism PBS occasionally does," says Chester at Center for Digital Democracy. "To sort of press for balance within each individual program and neuter PBS's ability to do serious reporting."

In his recent "On the Media" interview, Tomlinson insisted he simply wants to create a balance on the PBS schedule, so that for every liberal program there's a counterbalancing conservative program. But in December 2003, three months after being elected as the CPB's 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" (emphasis added), as if suggesting the use of a stopwatch to time how many minutes each side has to tell its story.

But there has never been a standard, or "law," requiring PBS to adhere to balance within each program. Instead, like the old fairness doctrine that applied to commercial broadcasters before it was rescinded during the Reagan administration, the fairness and balance guideline for PBS is measured by the totality of the network's schedule of programming.

In Saturday's Denver Post, James Morgese, president and general manager of the Rocky Mountain PBS station, wrote, "If what is happening in Washington goes unchecked, we will probably have to start counting which shows or even which guests on shows will balance or counter-balance each other, and then start tabulating the amount of minutes, or even seconds, devoted to ideological points of view." Morgese dubbed the current CPB objectivity campaign a "witch hunt."

Ironically, if strict new legal guidelines on fairness were applied, among the first shows that would have to be singled out for violating them would be "The Journal Editorial Report." Like "Tucker Carlson Unfiltered," which was shepherded to air with seed money from CPB, "The Journal Editorial Report" was tapped as a priority by the CPB to balance out "Now." But unlike "Now," which books conservative advocates such as Ralph Reed to debate issues, "The Journal Editorial Report" makes little effort to air opposing viewpoints during its weekly discussion of political events. For instance, during its March 25 segment on the unfolding Terri Schiavo story, every panelist agreed Congress had done the right thing by intervening in the right-to-die case, placing them well out of the American mainstream, which overwhelmingly objected to lawmakers' intervention in the case, according to several polls.

CPB board member Wilson suggests it's not just the Journal's editors who are out of step. "Ask the American people about fairness and balance at PBS and it's not at the top of their list. But it is at the top of the list for some within a small Beltway loop."

And for the moment, those people control public television.

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