Posted on: Friday, May 20, 2005
COMMENTARY
For hard right, there's never enough control
By Eric Mink
Kenneth Tomlinson's crusade to purify public broadcasting is Nixon Redux. It's also Reagan Redux and Gingrich Redux. For nearly 40 years, the independent news and public affairs work of public television and radio has stuck in the craw of the radical right, which smears any questioning or criticism of its positions as liberal prejudice. Bad strategy and poor timing limited the impact of efforts during the Reagan administration and after the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress to throttle public broadcasting's loose confederation of local stations, national programming and scheduling executives and independent producers. Now, however, the ideologues may have achieved the critical mass needed for success.
Tomlinson, a former editor of Reader's Digest and an occasional Republican functionary, made his first move within weeks of becoming chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in September 2003. His target of opportunity: Bill Moyers, the award-winning journalist and editorialist long despised by the right wing and a vigorous critic of policies of the Bush administration.
In a commentary published last week by the Washington Times, Tomlinson attributed the origin of his concern to a November 2003 phone call from an "old friend" who runs a foundation. The friend threatened to withhold future contributions to a local public TV station "until something was done" to correct what he regarded as the liberal bias of "Now with Bill Moyers," a little-watched one-hour news and interview program carried by some public stations on Friday nights.
Never mind that "Now's" blend of tough journalism, probing interviews and occasional commentary displayed more interest in and respect for opposing views than conservative propaganda outlets like Fox News Channel. Such an assessment apparently was beyond the ken of Tomlinson, who secretly hired a consultant to produce proof of the show's bias. (In doing so, he ignored the results of two broader opinion polls commissioned by CPB, which, according to reporting by Salon's Eric Boehlert, found "little viewer concern about bias" and impressively high opinions about the quality and fairness of public television and radio programs.)
Even before he had his consultant's findings, Tomlinson began pressuring executives at the Public Broadcasting Service about "Now." Eventually they caved, cutting the show's airtime in half and adding a couple of openly conservative talk shows to the PBS lineup. Moyers quit "Now," although in a feisty address to a conference of leftist media activists last weekend in St. Louis, he teased adversaries with the possibility that he might return.
Bolstered by his early success, Tomlinson has since hired a Bush White House staffer to help create CPB fairness standards and is championing a former GOP national co-chair for the chief executive's spot. Now, according to a report in Monday's New York Times, Tomlinson and other Bush appointees on the CPB board have turned their predatory gaze on National Public Radio and are pushing for — I kid you not — less news, more music.
Contrary to CPB's most important statutory mission — protecting public radio and television from political influence and interference, whether from right or left — Tomlinson has been focused on the politics of program content since ascending to the chairmanship two years ago.
All this reads like chapters from the Nixon attack plan against public TV and radio. Archives of administration memos and other papers from 1970, 1971, 1972 and 1973 document the systematic political interference of President Nixon and his aides in the affairs of public broadcasting. The goal — in direct defiance of the law — was to ensure that program content served Nixon's political and policy objectives.
Clay Whitehead directed the Office of Telecommunications Policy in the Nixon White House. Operatives worked through it to pack the CPB board with sympathizers, then set about trying to discredit adversarial journalists, eliminate news programming and engineer the replacement of the CPB president and chairman. Their more blatantly corrupt schemes collapsed, however, when the new chairman, former Missouri Republican Congressman Thomas Curtis, turned out to be a man of integrity and principle who stood up to them.
Even so, the political thugs of the Nixon administration managed to leave public broadcasting saddled with a decentralized structure that has undermined its ability to serve viewers and program underwriters alike.
They might have had more success had they heeded the telecommunications office's general counsel, a sharp young conservative lawyer named Antonin Scalia. In an urgent 1971 memo to Whitehead, Scalia warned that administration efforts to interfere directly with the operations of public broadcasting were likely to fail and to become public. "Naturally, this is the worst possible outcome," he wrote. Earlier in the year, Scalia had advised that "the best possibility for White House influence (over CPB) is through the presidential appointees to the board of directors."
If it weren't so damaging, the hard right's obsession with public broadcasting would be merely pathetic. By commercial television and radio measures, after all, PBS and NPR audiences are minuscule. Focus more narrowly on the news and public affairs programming that whips right-wingers into a lather, and you're dealing in truly tiny percentages of the viewing/listening audience — notwithstanding the high quality of the product.
Yet instead of just sucking up their annoyance with something few people see or hear, conservatives pump their pulse rates into triple digits and bleat about being the poor victims of liberal media bias. You'd think they'd take at least some small measure of comfort from their control of the White House, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and, if their plan works, the federal courts.
Eric Mink is commentary editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
