Hushing Free Speech, Crushing PBS

by Michael Winship

The most remarkable moment of the British election returns Thursday night went largely unreported in the United States.

Along with the other candidates for his seat in Parliament, Prime Minister Tony Blair stood on a stage at the Newton Aycliffe Leisure Centre in his home constituency, Sedgefield, to hear the official results.

Blair won, of course, but the emotional victory went to one of his opponents, Reg Keys, an independent who ran as an anti-war candidate, capturing ten percent of the vote.

Keys, 52, is a Welshman whose 20-year old son, Lance Corporal Tom Keys, was killed in Iraq nearly two years ago. Prime Minister Blair listened as the father dedicated his campaign to the 88 British troops who have died in the Iraqi war and attacked his opponent.

"I hope in my heart that one day the Prime Minister will be able to say sorry, he will say sorry to the families of the bereaved and one day the Prime Minister will feel able to visit wounded soldiers in hospital," Keys said.

"If this war had been justified by international law I would have grieved but not campaigned. If weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, again I would have grieved but not campaigned."

Under any circumstance, this confrontation would have been extraordinary. But with the exception of his debates with John Kerry, can you imagine George Bush standing there taking it as someone ripped into him and his policy?

You can't, because it would never happen. Control freaks -- obsessed with secrecy, orthodoxy, censorship and the squelching of information and conflicting points of view -- manage this administration and the Republican Party.

Whether it's the President's scripted, invitation-only town hall meetings on social security, suppressed government reports and evidence (like the documents on UN Ambassador-designate John Bolton's alleged meddling in U.S. policy on Syria) or the entire GOP campaign to end Senate filibusters on judicial candidates, we are in the clutches of a cabal deliriously devoted to the suppression of free speech.

This obsession extends to public broadcasting, the largest single funder of which is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a non-profit organization created by the Congress and funded by the Federal government. CPB is supposed to encourage the growth of public broadcasting and act as a so-called "heat shield" to protect the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio from government and political interference. It has done the opposite

As the New York Times led in its May 2 edition, "The Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is aggressively pressing public television to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias, prompting some public broadcasting leaders -- including the chief executive of PBS -- to object that his actions pose a threat to editorial independence."

In the interest of full disclosure, for more than thirty years, off and on, I have toiled in the vineyards of public broadcasting, sometimes more fruitfully than others.

I was around when the Nixon White House attempted to kill public broadcasting. PBS correspondents Robert MacNeil and Sander Vanocur were on the Nixon enemies list and the administration used CPB to divert funding away from national production centers in Boston, New York and Washington -- perceived hotbeds of nattering kneejerking -- to local stations.

Nixon didn't succeed, but not for lack of trying. It always has struck me as ironic that his downfall was brought about, in part, by public television's nighttime rebroadcasts of the Senate Watergate hearings, exposing his perfidies to a wider, primetime audience. In turn, that coverage strengthened PBS and heightened its identity.

Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich tried to eviscerate public broadcasting, too. But what's happening now is far worse. As the Times wrote in a follow-up editorial May 4, Kenneth Tomlinson, a former Readers Digest editor-in-chief and Steve Forbes campaign strategist, is "pushing public broadcasting over the ideological line to the Republican side, with blatantly partisan programming and the hiring of more Republican partisans to control the corporation."

These include:

• A White House staffer overseeing two ombudsmen hired to monitor public broadcasting programs for bias, one of whom is a former Digest colleague of Tomlinson's;
• A senior FCC official as CPB's chief operating officer (who told the Times he rarely watched or listened to public broadcasting -- a statement he now denies);
• A State Department official and former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee Tomlinson wants to make CPB's president and chief executive.
• What's more, over the last decade, two of the corporation's board members have donated more than $800,000 to the Republican Party.

One of Tomlinson's primary targets is PBS' Bill Moyers, of whom he has "a very vehement dislike," according to a former CPB employee, for his liberal point of view. (In the interest of even further full disclosure, for that aforementioned thirty years and more, I have been, off and on, a colleague and/or employee of Bill's.)

Tomlinson means to answer Moyers and his ilk with conservative counterprogramming such as "The Journal Editorial Report," hosted by Paul Gigot, editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal.

Moyers' commentaries were (he has retired from the weekly series, "Now") progressive counterprogramming to those who dominate our government. But contrary to Tomlinson's beliefs, the rest of Moyers' reporting and interviews were scrupulously fair. I speak from personal experience -- on several occasions Bill reined me in when he thought I had gone too far (once, coincidentally, when I suggested that the Bush administration was the most secretive in history...).

What's happening is frightening for another reason. PBS has never been a pillar of strength when challenged by authority (witness the Buster the Rabbit lesbian mommies dooharoo with Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings). At the merest anticipation of government disapproval, it frequently has folded like a three-dollar suitcase.

In recent memory, I worked on a public TV documentary, one of the executive producers of which ordered minimal, revealing soundbites from President Bush, apparently afraid of upsetting Washington. Self-censorship is perhaps the worst kind; weak and self-defeating. We should stop playing dead -- they can smell fear and for it have nothing but disdain.

The Times editorial continued, "Although he has insisted that he does not want to politicize PBS or cut any programs, Mr. Tomlinson has managed to spread the word throughout the PBS community that he does not like anything that he considers too anti-corporate, anti-White House or anti-Republican. For journalists whose basic code is to 'speak truth to power,' this is not good news: those are the main powers in the country."

Tomlinson, even your pal Karl Rove, speaking April 18 at Maryland's Washington College, has admitted that the media is "less liberal than it is oppositional." (He also confessed to listening to NPR.)

Journalists, Rove said, see themselves as "being put on the earth to afflict the comfortable, to be a constant thorn of those in power, whether they are Republican or Democrat." He was alluding to Mr. Dooley's famous definition of journalism's purpose, "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

As reported by the Center for Digital Democracy, two public opinion surveys commissioned by CPB but buried in its annual report to Congress and not released to the media -- including PBS and NPR! -- revealed that, in reality, public broadcasting has an 80% favorable rating and that "the majority of the U.S. adult population does not believe that the news and information programming on public broadcasting is biased.

In fact, more than half believed PBS provided more in-depth and trustworthy news and information than the networks and 55% said PBS was "fair and balanced." So, as happened in the Terri Schiavo brouhaha, once again the White House and its Republican allies have flown in the face of public opinion.

Tomlinson did seem to express some contrition to Monday's Los Angeles Times. "I'm a fan of public broadcasting," he insisted. "I'm going to reach out to liberal advocacy groups and assure them that I wouldn't harm a hair of their favorite programs."

But his comments bear the vulpine whiff of Red Riding Hood's wolf. Just in case, five public interest groups, including Common Cause and Consumers Union, will be holding informational sessions around the country to "take public broadcasting back to the people." Unlike a White House town meeting, these will be open to everyone, including ... viewers like you.