Hostile takeover

I know, I know: Those annual pledge drives for public TV and radio make you want to set your hair on fire. Those semi-annual “specials” featuring a toothless array of aged folk and rock musicians are like an A.A.R.P. version of The Gong Show.

And if that’s not bad enough, the proliferation of corporate sponsorships, combined with a general air of self-congratulation, is enough to cast more than a little doubt about the ability of PBS and NPR to be truly independent.

But let’s face it: When it comes to news coverage and documentaries, public broadcasting in this country has done the public proud. From The News Hour With Jim Lehrer to Frontline, Morning Edition, to All Things Considered, the public affairs programming produced under the aegis of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) constitutes a worthy standard of excellence.

Naturally, the neo-cons in the Bush Administration want to wreck it.

For the past six months, right-wing Republicans have been engaged in what can only be called a hostile takeover of public broadcasting. For the sake of clarity, it’s important to know at the outset how this country’s public broadcasting bureaucracy works. First, there’s the CPB, a board that, at the moment, is controlled by Republican appointees. The CPB receives funding from Congress and then provides those funds to public television (PBS) and radio (NPR).

Kenneth Tomlinson, a former executive with Reader’s Digest and a contributor to the Bush campaigns, has been the chairman of the CPB since 2003. He has said, “If a significant number of conservatives are saying public TV is not for them, we need to change that.”

Those changes began in January when PBS decided not to distribute an episode of a children’s show, Postcards From Buster, because Education Secretary Margaret Spellings objected to an appearance on the show by two lesbian moms.

In April, Kathleen Cox, the CPB’s president, resigned without explanation after only nine months on the job. She was replaced by an interim director, Ken Ferree, a former assistant to Michael Powell at the Federal Communications Commission. Ferree is known as a cheerleader for media deregulation and consolidation. He set a certain tone when he gave an interview to the New York Times Magazine in which he cavalierly claimed not to watch much on PBS and that, since he rode a motorcycle, didn’t listen to the news on NPR.

Then it came out that Tomlinson had hired a consultant to watch the Bill Moyers show, Now, in order to keep track of the number of conservative guests who appeared there. In the meantime, Moyers retired and PBS picked up two new shows, featuring conservatives Tucker Carlson and Paul Gigot.

During April, Tomlinson announced the appointment of two ombudsmen, Ken Bode of DePauw University and the Hudson Institute and William Schulz, another Reader’s Digest alum, to examine issues of fairness and balance at PBS. Tomlinson hired Mary Catherine Andrews, former Bush director of global communications, to “coordinate” this new office.

Finally, Tomlinson named Patricia Harrison, a State Department official and former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, to ultimately replace Ferree as CPB president. As Joe Conason observed, “Imagine the horrified screaming from the right if, as president, Bill Clinton had dared choose a former Democratic Party chair to oversee public broadcasting. Every right-thinking pundit and politician would howl for the immediate and total defunding of CPB …”

The biggest irony in this case is that the public has given no indication that it thinks public broadcasting is politically biased. In 2002, the CPB board called for a survey to see how viewers thought PBS was doing. Overall, only 21 percent of respondents thought PBS was too liberal; only 7 percent thought its war coverage was “slanted.”

This wasn’t what Tomlinson wanted to hear, so, in 2003, he commissioned another survey on liberal bias, conducted jointly by a Republican and a Democratic firm, including focus groups in red 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.”

Once again, roughly 80 percent of people polled had a favorable opinion of public broadcasting. A strong majority said PBS’s news and information programming was more trustworthy and in-depth than ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox or CNN. Most called PBS “a valuable cultural resource” and a plurality of 48 percent wanted the government to provide more funding to PBS (only 10 percent wanted less).

You’d think the people in charge at the CPB would be bragging about results like these. They’ve all but buried them. Instead, Tomlinson’s CPB challenged PBS’ code of journalism standards, demanding that funding be linked to an outside assessment of “objectivity and balance.” So far, this demand has been rebuffed on First Amendment grounds. But PBS’ standards are in the process of being updated by a panel of journalists and academics. How Tomlinson and Co. will view the results remains to be seen.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” If that saying applies to anything, it’s public broadcasting. You’d think that being “conservative,” people like Tomlinson would get that better than most. But as Bush Inc. keeps showing us, this administration isn’t interested in what people want — it’s about power and control. If they get their way, there may soon be more the matter with public broadcasting than those annoying fund drives.