Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
There's mounting evidence that the man in charge of public broadcasting is on a conservative crusade.
Jun 23, 2005 | Despite his continued protestations to the contrary, it's becoming harder and harder to believe the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's chairman, Ken Tomlinson, when he says that his main concern is to try to bring some political "balance" to PBS's lineup.
While polls have shown that a majority of Americans don't see PBS as leaning one way or the other ideologically, Tomlinson seems to view programming choices in a starkly black-and-white manner; as he told NPR's Bob Garfield on May 6, "I don't want to achieve balance by taking programs that are the favorites of good liberals off the air. I want to make sure that when you have programs that tilt left, we also have some programs that tilt right."
The problem is that, if his actions are any guide, administration-approved appointments, secret contracts with conservative content monitors and suppressing polls that refute his "liberal bias" charge are part and parcel of his vision of balance. In effect, Tomlinson is stacking the deck so far to the right at the CPB that what he claims to see as balance, many others view as a right-wing coup in public broadcasting.
A Republican appointee originally named to the CPB board by President Clinton in 2000 and promoted to chairman by President Bush in September 2003, Tomlinson currently heads all of the country's publicly funded broadcasting -- both domestically and internationally. In an unprecedented move, he also chairs the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees U.S. government-sponsored, nonmilitary, international broadcasting, a dual role that no one has ever held before.
Recently, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have called for Tomlinson to resign from both posts because of his having spent close to $30,000, without the knowledge of CPB's board, on consultants to monitor PBS's content for "liberal bias" and having hired a White House staffer to write rules for two other new content monitors -- possible violations of federal law.
These calls come at a critical time for the CPB, as the House Appropriations Committee just voted to cut its funding by about half (which, if it stands, would be the largest cut in its history), and the board is looking for a new president.
The past week has been a rough one for Tomlinson, with a veritable flood of evidence pointing to the hubris he has exhibited in trying to prove the "liberal bias" in public broadcasting canard. Late last week, the New York Times reported that Tomlinson had authorized, without the consent of the CPB's board, $14,170 in payments to a consultant named Fred Mann. He tapped Mann to monitor the political leanings of guests on PBS's "Now" program, which was then hosted by Bill Moyers, for evidence of bias. According to reports, Mann labeled segments "pro-" or "anti-" Bush, and "anti-corporation" or "anti-DeLay."
How do we know this? Not because Tomlinson released the information to the public. Rather, Sen. Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, demanded to be provided with the information Mann gathered, and while his office would not release the data to the public or the media, Dorgan spoke on the Senate floor Monday, outlining some of his findings.
Meanwhile, there has been quite a bit of speculation about why Tomlinson would hire a guy in Indianapolis no one had ever heard of to monitor PBS. Who is Fred Mann? On Sunday, the Indianapolis Star almost unwittingly outed him, in the process providing a glimpse of Mann's partisan credentials. In a short item on the controversy, the paper reported tracking down someone named Fred Mann, but couldn't find out if it had found the right one, concluding simply that "a Frederick W. Mann, 61, who has worked for the conservative National Journalism Center in Washington, has Indianapolis ties."
Turns out they had the right Mann. And it gets even better: The National Journalism Center was founded by the American Conservative Union, which describes itself as "the nation's oldest conservative lobbying organization."
More recently, the NJC has been run by the conservative Young America's Foundation. Even if these were the only indications we had of Tomlinson's partisanship, they would still go a long way in calling into question his contention that he is merely taking an unbiased look at the political leanings of public broadcasting.
If that isn't enough to call his credibility into question, it appears that Tomlinson also lied to a member of Congress about the contract. According to the New York Times, in a letter dated May 24, he told Sen. Dorgan that he didn't consult with the CPB's board about hiring Mann because it had been "approved and signed by then CPB President, Kathleen Cox." The only problem is, the contract is dated Feb. 3, 2004 -- five months before Cox became president.
These are merely the latest developments in a months-long string of deception, partisan hackery and willful malfeasance on Tomlinson's part -- moves that have unquestionably undermined the health and future of public broadcasting. But it appears that help may finally be on the way.
In May, the two top Democrats on the House Appropriations and Commerce committees, Reps. David Obey and John Dingell, delivered a letter to the inspector general of the CPB, Kenneth Konz, demanding an investigation into Tomlinson's actions.
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