What's really up with CPB

Although PBS has had $100 million of public funding restored to it - for children's programming - the battle is far from over. As I noted the other day, the whole system is under serious threat of emasculation.

Frank Rich gets its right. In an Op-Ed piece in last Sunday's New York Times, he points out that just because First Lady Laura Bush likes to be seen in public with Big Bird,

That doesn't mean the right's new assault on public broadcasting is toothless, far from it. But this time the game is far more insidious and ingenious. The intent is not to kill off PBS and NPR but to castrate them by quietly annexing their news and public affairs operations to the larger state propaganda machine that the Bush White House has been steadily constructing at taxpayers' expense. If you liked the fake government news videos that ended up on local stations - or thrilled to the "journalism" of Armstrong Williams and other columnists who were covertly paid to promote administration policies - you'll love the brave new world this crowd envisions for public TV and radio.

Rich reviews CPB chair Ken Tomlinson's "long career as a "professional propagandist". This career goes back to the Reagan years, when he ran Voice of America, which is either an instrument of public diplomacy or propaganda, depending on your point of view. Then, according to Rich, "he moved on to edit Reader's Digest, where, according to Peter Canning's 1996 history of the magazine, American Dreamers, he was rumored to be 'a kind of "Manchurian Candidate"' because of the ensuing spike in pro-CIA spin in Digest articles." Now if that had all been left in Tomlinson's past, I might swallow hard and accept it (after all, this is the Bush administration, where no-one sets the bar very high for public office probity anymore). But when you consider that Tomlinson is also currently the "chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the federal body that supervises all nonmilitary international United States propaganda outlets, Voice of America included," that's a bit too much. Frank Rich agrees: "That the administration's foremost propagandist would also be chairman of the board of CPB, the very organization meant to shield public broadcasting from government interference, is astonishing."

Rich goes on to review the ridiculous "research" on "objectivity" secretly carried out for Tomlinson by shady operator Fred Mann - "research" that Tomlinson then tried to cover up from view. Why, asks Rich,

would Mr. Tomlinson pay for information that any half-sentient viewer could track with TiVo? Why would he hire someone in Indiana? Why would he keep this contract a secret from his own board? Why, when a reporter exposed his secret, would he try to cover it up by falsely maintaining in a letter to an inquiring member of the Senate, Byron Dorgan, that another CPB executive had "approved and signed" the Mann contract when he had signed it himself? If there's a news story that can be likened to the "third-rate burglary," the canary in the coal mine that invited greater scrutiny of the Nixon administration's darkest ambitions, this strange little sideshow could be it.

Following the uncovering of this "arrangement" by Stephen Labaton of the Times, Senator Dorgan (a North Dakota Democrat),

called Mr. Tomlinson demanding to see the "product" Mr. Mann had provided for his $14,170 payday. Mr. Tomlinson sent the senator some 50 pages of "raw data." Sifting through those pages when we spoke by phone last week, Mr. Dorgan said it wasn't merely Mr. [Bill] Moyers's show that was monitored but also the programs of Tavis Smiley and NPR's Diane Rehm.

Their guests were rated either L for liberal or C for conservative, and "anti-administration" was affixed to any segment raising questions about the Bush presidency. Thus was the conservative Republican Senator Chuck Hagel given the same L as Bill Clinton simply because he expressed doubts about Iraq in a discussion mainly devoted to praising Ronald Reagan. Three of The Washington Post's star beat reporters (none of whom covers the White House or politics or writes opinion pieces) were similarly singled out simply for doing their job as journalists by asking questions about administration policies.

"It's pretty scary stuff to judge media, particularly public media, by whether it's pro or anti the president," Senator Dorgan said. "It's unbelievable."

I'm glad some people in Washington DC still think this kind of stuff is "scary." I certainly do. But it gets worse.

Eric Boehlert of Salon discovered that one of the two public ombudsmen Mr. Tomlinson recruited in April to monitor the news broadcasts at PBS and NPR for objectivity, William Schulz, is a former writer for the radio broadcaster Fulton Lewis Jr., a notorious Joe McCarthy loyalist and slime artist. The Times reported that to provide "insights" into Conrad Burns, a Republican senator who supported public-broadcasting legislation that Mr. Tomlinson opposed, $10,000 was shelled out to Brian Darling, the GOP operative who wrote the memo instructing Republicans to milk Terri Schiavo as "a great political issue."

But then, last Thursday, came the worst blow of all, what Rich describes as "a Rove dream came true":

Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, ascended to the CPB presidency. In her last job, as an assistant secretary of state, Ms. Harrison publicly praised the department's production of faux-news segments [i.e., VNRs] - she called them "good news" segments - promoting American success in Afghanistan and Iraq. As The Times reported in March, one of those fake news videos ended up being broadcast as real news on the Fox affiliate in Memphis.

So now, just to sum up, we have a former (and current) government propagandist as CPB's chair , and a former RNC co-chair as the CPB's president. So much for impartiality. Under the circumstances, I like Rich's conclusion, which harkens back to Watergate, the last time CPB was under such severe stress.

As the public broadcasting debate plays out, there will be the usual talk about how to wean it from federal subsidy and the usual complaints (which I share) about the redundancy, commerciality and declining quality of some PBS programming in a cable universe. But once Big Bird, like that White House Thanksgiving turkey, is again ritualistically saved from the chopping block and the Senate restores more of the House's budget cuts, the most crucial test of the damage will be what survives of public broadcasting's irreplaceable journalistic offerings.

Will monitors start harassing Jim Lehrer's "NewsHour", which Mr. Tomlinson trashed at a March 2004 State Department conference as a "tired and slowed down" also-ran to Shepard Smith's rat-a-tat-tat newscast at Fox News? Will "Frontline" still be taking on the tough investigations that network news no longer touches? Will the reportage on NPR be fearless or the victim of a subtle or not-so-subtle chilling effect instilled by Mr. Tomlinson and his powerful allies in high places?

Forget the pledge drive. What's most likely to save the independent voice of public broadcasting from these thugs is a rising chorus of Deep Throats.