Bush Regime Subversion of PBS

In an article titled Right-wing Coup at PBS?, which is reprinted at AlterNet.org, Rory O'Connor examines what appears very much to be a movement to actively subvert Public Broadcasting to the Republican agenda. He wrote in part:

An unnamed senior FCC official went further, however, telling The Washington Post that CPB under Tomlinson "is engaged in a systematic effort not just to sanitize the truth, but to impose a right-wing agenda on PBS. It's almost like a right-wing coup. It appears to be orchestrated."

Ken Tomlinson dismisses such concerns, however, as "paranoia," telling the Post that his critics should simply "grow up," remarking in the Times, "I frankly feel at PBS headquarters that there is a tone deafness to issues of tone and balance."

[...]

But Tomlinson kept hidden the results of two "National Public Opinion" surveys indicating that the overwhelming majority of the U.S. public is happy with PBS programming. The documents, buried in an annual report to Congress, were neither released to the press nor shared with PBS. But both surveys confirm the same thing: "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-ten detect a conservative bias."

While "liberal bias" has been alleged for many years, the accusation became a common place with the explosion of conservative talk radio in the early 1990s. Rush Limbaugh and other, less prominent radio hosts made allegations of press bias a mantra. [...]

In fact, many biases, most of them professional, not political, shape the news. Reporters have a bias toward the use of official sources, a bias toward information that can be obtained quickly, a bias toward conflict, a bias toward focusing on discrete events rather than persistent conditions, and a bias toward the simple over the complex. These biases have a far greater role in determining the content of news than any political preferences a reporter might have.
--The Press Effect[01], pg 169/170

A second indicator is his bleating about a lack of "balance". Balance does not necessarily mean airing opposing viewpoints, it means transmitting all of the information (facts) a viewer needs to make up his own mind, whether the reporter likes that information or not. When a Bush sycophant speaks of a lack of balance, however, it's a safe bet that he is talking about viewpoints and information that is critical of or does not support the Bush regime propaganda and party line. The kind of reporting for which administration officials will denounce people as unAmerican and unpatriotic and soft on terrorism. In point of fact, PBS has been undergoing a sharp swing toward imbalance as liberal leaning viewpoints have been forced off the air. Bill Moyers comes to mind, as does the recent episode of Buster Bunny, censored by Margaret Spelling for daring to admit of lesbianism and same sex couples.

To top it off, on 03 May another article on this movement was published by Media Matters for America; it is titled NY Times Article Omitted Key Facts About CPB's New Ombudsmen, and is printed at CommonDreams.org. It blows the whistle on key facts that were not in the New York Times article; to whit:

• William Schulz:
  • is an avowed conservative with close ties to Tomlinson,
  • was lauded by National Review for remaining at Reader's Digest to maintain conservative leanings there when Tomlinson resigned,
  • was lauded by National Review for withdrawing Reader's Digest funding from the conservative American Enterprise Institute to register dissatisfaction with what he called the desire,at Reader's Digest "to move the organization to the center and appeal to foundations and corporations not thought of as conservative";

• Ken Bode:
  • is a former NBC national political correspondent,
  • is a former CNN senior political analyst,
  • is an adjunct fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute,
  • endorsed Indiana Republican gubernatorial candidate Mitch Daniels in 2004,
  • a National Review article lamented his resignation from Reader's Digest as a "saddening transformation" away from "overt conservatism";

• W. Kenneth Ferree, CPB's new chief operating officer and acting president:
  • is a former senior official at the Federal Communications Commission,
  • played a significant role in the effort to loosen rules to promote media consolidaton,
  • does not watch PBS,
  • does not listen to NPR,
  • even though both are grantees of CPB.

Also, of some note, in the source article for the above entry, it was reported that Tomlinson had appointed two ombudsmen where PBS had none before. That he had appointed two set off a number of mental alarms for me. One would be sufficient; but to now find out that both of these officials can be counted on to enforce the party line only reinforces my opinion that this is a move to subvert PBS.

Most especially, I would like to draw the reader's attention to O'Connor's report about the National Public Opinion surveys results: 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-ten detect a conservative bias.

What could one infer from this? That there are more republican/conservative citizens than democrat/liberal by a margin of two to one? Well, you could, but you'd be wrong given that the 2004 elections saw such close voting that Bush won by the most narrow margin in the history of the American democratic system. It would be more reasonable to infer -- assuming that the surveys were properly conducted and sampled a representative cross section of U.S. society -- that conservatives are twice as likely as liberals to believe in biased press conspiracy theory.

This surmise goes hand in hand with observations that conservatives tend to uncritically accept what they are told by authority. Indeed, not questioning authority is one of the touchstones of ultra-conservatism. Liberals, on the other hand, are so irritating to conservatives because they do tend to think critically. Which means: for themselves.

Unkindly, one could infer from the data that right-wingers are twice as hypersensitive and reactionary as left-wingers. This, however, is strictly a political cheap shot.

I'd be willing to bet, though, that Tomlinson has interpreted this data to mean that there is in fact a liberal bias because the majority of those who in believe in such a bias say it is liberal instead of conservative.

Various other sources for information about this issue:

• New York Times: Republican Chairman Exerts Pressure on PBS, Alleging Biases
• Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting: CPB Exerting Political Pressure on Public Television
  (Putting the lie to the conpiracy theory)
• Working for Change: Must-Flee TV
• CommonDreams.org: PBS Losing Its Autonomy
• St. Petersburg Times Editorial: A Publicly Funded Fox News?
• Los Angeles Times: The Leaning Tower of PBS

[Addendum (18 May 2005:) Bill Moyers, in his closing speech at the National Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis, 15 May, covered the Tomlinson Affair in greater detail. The transcript is reprinted at Alternet.org. On 17 May, FAIR issued an e-mail action alert about how:

. . . the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is considering "a study on whether NPR's Middle East coverage was more favorable to Arabs than to Israelis"--further evidence that the agency intends to police public media for content it deems too "liberal."

The Times reported that two of the CPB board members had expressed concern over the alleged bias of the public radio network's reporting. Gay Hart Gaines, formerly a Republican fundraiser, "talked about the need to change programming in light of a conversation she had had with a taxi driver about his listening habits." Her colleague on the CPB board, Cheryl Halpern, reportedly raised complaints about NPR's reporting. The Times noted that Halpern is "a former chairwoman of the Republican Jewish Coalition and leading party fund-raiser whose family has business interests in Israel."

[Addendum (19 Dec 2005:) On 09 Dec 2005, Bill Moyers delivered an address for the 20th anniversary of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, in Washington D.C.; collaborating with him on this speech was Michael Winship. Mr. Moyers addressed the issues Tomlinson had with NOW With Bill Moyers in part by saying:

What got Tomlinson's goat was our reporting. After all, we kept after his political pals for keeping secrets, and over and again we reported on how the big media conglomerates were in cahoots with official Washington, scheming for permission to get bigger and bigger. The mainstream media wouldn't touch this topic. Murdoch, Time Warner, Viacom, GE/NBC, Disney/ABC, Clear Channel, Sinclair -- all stood to gain if their lobbying succeeded. Barry Diller appeared on our broadcast and described the relationship between the big news media and Washington as an "oligarchy." Sure enough, except for NOW with Bill Moyers, the broadcast media were silent about how they were lobbying for more and more power over what Americans see, read, and hear. It was left to one little broadcast, relegated to the black hole of Friday night, to shine the light on one of the most important stories of the decade.

What finally sent Tomlinson over the edge and off to the ramparts, however, was a documentary we did about the people of Tamaqua, a small town in Pennsylvania. The Morgan Knitting Mill there had just laid off more than a third of its workforce -- the last of 25 textile mills that sustained the townspeople after the demise of the coal industry. The jobs were going to Honduras and China. Our report told how free trade agreements like NAFTA had encouraged companies to lay off American workers, produce goods more cheaply abroad and then import the goods back here. We showed how the global economy contributes to the growing inequality in America, with the gap between the rich and poor doubling in the last three decades until it is now wider than in the days of the Great Depression.

FOOTNOTES:

[01] The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories That Shape the Political World
Kathleen Hall Jamieson & Paul Waldman -2003
ISBN 0-19-515277-8
Dewey # 071.3 J323P

Unfortunately, Jamieson and Waldman, indeed, no one in the press, could have forseen the kind of blatant ass kissing that would derive from the World Trade Center attack and resulting hysteria. I do not know how this compares to analogous events in American history, as the WTC attack is unique in its scope to my lifetime. The most recent previous event, the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, was a dozen years before I was born.
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