The Free Press
Sunday 15 May 2005
Veteran journalist calls for nationwide public hearings on future of public broadcasting in speech at the National Conference for Media Reform.
St. Louis - In a speech before 1,400 media activists, television journalist Bill Moyers lambasted Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), for hijacking public broadcasting to serve a partisan agenda.
"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," Moyers told a packed room at the National Conference for Media Reform. "And that's what Kenneth Tomlinson has been doing."
Tomlinson, a staunch Republican, has launched a personal crusade aimed at "eliminating the perception of political bias" in PBS programs. He has covertly promoted right-wing programming and tried to install his political allies to CPB's board and executive offices. He even contracted an outside consultant to monitor Moyers' weekly PBS news program, "NOW with Bill Moyers," for signs of liberal bias.
"The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party gets," Moyers said. "That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth."
In his first public statement since the controversy over the CPB emerged, Moyers announced that he had sent a letter to Tomlinson requesting an hour-long program on PBS to debate the direction of public broadcasting. Earlier this month, 50,000 concerned citizens signed a Free Press petition urging Tomlinson to resign.
Moyers also endorsed a call by Free Press, Common Cause, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union and Media Access Project for a series of town hall meetings nationwide so Americans can speak directly to station managers and policymakers about what they want and expect from public broadcasting.
"That great mob that is democracy is rarely heard, and that's not just the fault of the current residents of the White House and Capitol," Moyers said. "There is a great chasm between those of us in the business and those who depend on TV and radio as their window to the world. We treat them too much like audiences and not enough like citizens. They are invited to look through the window, but too infrequently to participate and make public broadcasting public."
The National Conference for Media Reform, hosted and organized by the nonpartisan media reform group Free Press, brought together thousands of media activists, educators, journalists, policymakers and concerned citizens from across the country and around the world who are concerned with the current state of the media.
"An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical," Moyers said. "And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too."
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