Don't Get Fooled Again
By Rory O'Connor
AlterNet
Printed on July 19, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/23602/
Meet the new boss.
She's the same as the old boss -- or maybe even worse.
So if you've been appalled at the "creeping conservative" coup in public
broadcasting ... dismayed at seeing Bill Moyers pilloried while millions of
taxpayer dollars were lavished on a public affairs program anchored by the
soft-right son of a former chief of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
(CPB), and a news chat show featuring the hard-right editorial board of the
Wall Street Journal ... horrified by the selection of the former head of
the Republican National Committee as CPB president ... and were moved to
call for CPB Chair Ken Tomlinson to leave his post ... watch out!
You're about to get what you asked for.
The controversial Tomlinson's second one-year term expires in September --
and he cannot be reappointed. As the Washington Post reported last week, a
leading Republican donor named Cheryl F. Halpern is the top candidate to
replace him.
Halpern and her husband Fred -- long major financial supporters of
Republican candidates -- have given more than $324,000 to Republicans since
1989. During the last election, Mother Jones magazine ranked them among the
nation's top 100 "hard" money contributors.
Appointed to the CPB board three years ago by President Bush, Halpern is a
close ally of Tomlinson and part of the five-member Republican majority now
controlling the board. She and Tomlinson served together on the
Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which oversees the federal
government's international broadcasting services, such as Voice of America
(VOA) and Radio Free Europe. Those overseas government information services
often serve as a feeder system for pubic broadcasting officials.
(Tomlinson chairs the BBG as well as CPB, and directed VOA during the
Reagan administration; former CPB Chairman Richard Carlson once headed the
VOA; former CPB President Bob Coonrod was a longtime U.S. Information
Agency executive; current CPB board-member Ernest J. Wilson III was a U.S.
Information Agency official during the Clinton years; current NPR President
Kevin Klose was the BBG's top executive; his deputy, Ken Stern, also worked
there.)
As the chair of CPB, the agency that distributes federal funds to
noncommercial radio and TV stations and supposedly serves as a buffer
between public broadcasting and politicians seeking to influence its news
reporting and programming, Halpern would be far from impartial. At the
Senate confirmation hearing on her nomination to the CPB board in 2003, for
example, she suggested that public broadcasting journalists should be
penalized for biased programs. She also agreed with Senator Trent Lott,
R-Miss., when he questioned the objectivity of the award-winning PBS
journalist and commentator Bill Moyers.
"I certainly think he's the most partisan and nonobjective person I know in
media of any kind," Lott said of Moyers. "It's the most blatantly partisan,
irresponsible thing I've ever heard in my life, and yet [CPB] has not
seemed to be willing to deal with Bill Moyers and that type of programming."
"The fact of the matter is, I agree," Halpern told Lott. "There has to be
recognition that an objective, balanced code of journalistic ethics has got
to prevail across the board, and there needs to be accountability." She
added that penalties for journalists would be justified when balance fails,
although CPB's own rules prohibited interfering with programming decisions.
"When there were allegations of impropriety [at the BBG] in violation of
the journalistic code of ethics," Halpern told the senators, "we were able
to aggressively step in, review the transcript of the potential violation
and initiate penalties."
Neither Halpern nor Lott ever said what penalties they might propose. But
Halpern did refer to her previous powers at the BBG -- which included
"physical removal" of journalists -- as a model: "Going back to my BBG
days, we were able to remove physically somebody who had engaged in
editorialization of the news," she said.
"Was that man removed in handcuffs?" asked Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J.
If chosen as the new CPB Chair, Halpern's high-profile comments and
political connections threaten to make her tenure every bit as
controversial as Tomlinson's, -- which thus far has led public broadcasting
executives to accuse him of partisanship, and Democrats to call for his
resignation.
But if Halpern's nomination runs into trouble, informed sources say the
Republicans have another candidate waiting in the wings -- another CPB
board member named Gay Hart Gaines.
Gaines was a top fundraiser for Newt Gingrich a decade ago when he
campaigned to de-fund CPB. She and her husband Stanley have donated more
than $491,000 to Republican causes since 1989, according to federal figures
compiled by Common Cause. Ms. Gaines, who chaired Gingrich's GOPAC
fundraising vehicle, has such stature in Republican circles that South
Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford once told her hometown (Palm Beach, Florida)
newspaper, the Palm Beach Daily News, "When Gay Gaines asks you to do
something, you say, 'Yes, ma'am.'"
Of course, politicizing public broadcasting is nothing new. Appointment to
CPB's board is the result of a political patronage process, and to the
victor belongs the spoils. When Democrats occupy the White House, they also
put generous and well-connected friends on the CPB Board. Alan Sagner, one
Clinton-era board member and chairman in 1996-97, gave more to Democrats
than the Halperns gave to Republicans -- in excess of $399,000 since 1990,
according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
And while two recent national surveys of TV viewers, commissioned by Ken
Tomlinson, gave high marks to both PBS and NPR for their news and
public-affairs reporting, and although two veteran journalists hired by
Tomlinson in April to serve as ombudsmen have thus far filed reports filled
only with praise for public broadcasting programming, Cheryl Halpern's
nomination as CPB Chair will only ensure that the charged, highly partisan
politics of public broadcasting shows no sign of abating anytime soon.
================================
George Antunes, Political Science Dept
University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204
Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927
antunes at uh dot edu
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