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http://snipurl.com/f44b SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE May 23, 2005 PBS doesn't need this balancing act By Robert P. Laurence This is just what PBS needed. The man who's supposed to protect public broadcasting from political influence is trying to impose his own political agenda. He's doing it, of course, in the name of what he calls "balance." That's an old tactic of the right. The pioneer was Rush Limbaugh, who first steered AM talk radio to starboard while declaring all the rest of the news media were just too "liberal." Fox News likewise declares that everybody's-prejudiced-but-us, calling itself "fair and balanced" while following a policy that's anything but. The same strategy is now being employed by Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit corporation created by the federal government in 1967 to fund public broadcasters. The government gives money to CPB, and CPB passes it on to PBS, National Public Radio and local stations around the country. The idea was that CPB would form a bureaucratic buffer between politicians and broadcasters, protecting the latter from interference by the former. Now, as reported in recent stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post, the system is being subverted. Tomlinson has taken several actions which, taken alone, might be seen as innocuous. Taken as whole, they seem ominous. He's initiated a new program featuring editors from the conservativeWall Street Journal, appointed White House and Republican officials to powerful CPB jobs, publicly accused PBS of a "political image problem" despite evidence to the contrary, and asked for reviews of NPR news coverage. Tomlinson was called to comment for this column, but a CPB spokesman said he "is not doing interviews for the time being." PBS President Pat Mitchell, who until now has been reluctant to challenge administration attempts to influence PBS, told theTimes "there have been instances of attempts to influence content from a political perspective that I do not consider appropriate." She plans to deliver a speech tomorrow to the National Press Club in Washington on the subject of "PBS: More Essential Than Ever," in which she will explain how PBS "will continue to play a crucial role in the nation's civic and cultural life." Of course, that may be just the role that Tomlinson would like to make less important. Tomlinson was appointed to the CPB board by President Clinton in 2000 and promoted to chairman by President Bush. Two years ago, according to a story on the controversy aired Friday on NPR's "Morning Edition" news show, he proposed bringing in Fox News anchor Brit Hume to advise NPR on how to create balanced news programming. More recently, he's been citing a study he personally ordered of "Now," the weekly PBS news and commentary show founded by Bill Moyers, who retired about six months ago. The show carries on, but at a half-hour instead of an hour. Tomlinson wrote an article May 10 for The Washington Times in which he said he had "irrefutable documentation of the program's bias" in the form of a study he had commissioned. But a CPB spokesman refused to release the study. "It's an internal document at this point," he said. "We're not sharing it." Tomlinson used his conclusions about "Now" to push for creation of "The Journal Editorial Report," hosted by Paul Gigot, editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal. Mitchell, Tomlinson said flatly, was "forced to add political balance to the PBS lineup." ("Now" is carried by San Diego's KPBS/Channel 15, at 8:30 p.m. Fridays, but "Journal Report" is not.) Moyers, addressing the National Conference for Media Reform on May 15 in St. Louis, called Tomlinson's moves "a contemporary example of the age-old ambition of power and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable. . . "I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. But that's what Kenneth Tomlinson has done." Tomlinson has hired one Bush White House official as a senior staff member at CPB and wants to hire another, Patricia Harrison, former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee and now an assistant secretary of state, as CPB president and chief executive. Tomlinson in his Washington Times article wrote about the "political image problem" of PBS as if it were an acknowledged, widely accepted fact. Actually, the opposite is true. And he knows it. CPB conducted its own study of the subject in December 2003, asking a Democratic research company and a Republican firm to conduct surveys, asking Americans what they thought of news programs on PBS and NPR. Both found the same results: "The majority of the U.S. adult population does not believe that the news and information programming on public broadcasting is biased. The plurality of Americans indicate that there is no apparent bias one way or the other, while approximately one in five detect a liberal bias and approximately one in 10 detect a conservative bias." On the other hand, the report noted, "There is a core segment of the population that will always contend that all news media is biased no matter what." Now Tomlinson is floating a plan to monitor NPR news reports from the Middle East for evidence of bias, and he is appointing two ombudsmen, one liberal and one conservative, to evaluate news programs. "Problems with NPR's Middle East coverage in the past have been to a major extent documented," he said on NPR's Friday report. NPR President Kevin Klose in an interview last week said that Tomlinson has yet to speak to him directly about all of this, and that he's cited "no examples, none, zero" of bias in Middle East coverage. "I'm feeling puzzled," he said, "seeing there's no substance to Mr. Tomlinson's unsupported and, in my view, insupportable view." Besides, he said, NPR has long had an ombudsman dealing with public complaints. "CPB is not responsible for our content," he said. "CPB does not create content. And since we already have an ombudsman who has been satisfactory to thousands of listeners over five years, and who is completely independent, the notion you need somebody else to do this has not been explained." Asked if he thought Tomlinson was carrying out a political agenda on the part of the Bush administration, Klose said: "I don't know exactly what the motives are. Mr. Tomlinson is saying this is not a matter of partisanship on his part. "But so far as I can tell, it seems to me that it probably walks like a duck." _____________________________ Note: This message comes from the peace-justice-news e-mail mailing list of articles and commentaries about peace and social justice issues, activism, etc. If you do not regularly receive mailings from this list or have received this message as a forward from someone else and would like to be added to the list, send a blank e-mail with the subject "subscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or you can visit: http://lists.enabled.com/mailman/listinfo/peace-justice-news Go to that same web address to view the list's archives or to unsubscribe. E-mail accounts that become full, inactive or out of order for more than a few days will be deleted from this list. FAIR USE NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. 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