Tomlinson, a former editor of Reader's Digest and an occasional Republican functionary, made his first move within weeks of becoming chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in September 2003. His target of opportunity: Bill Moyers, the award-winning journalist and editorialist long despised by the right wing and a vigorous critic of policies of the Bush administration.
Bolstered by his early success, Tomlinson has since hired a Bush White House staffer to help create CPB fairness standards and is championing a former GOP national co-chair for the chief executive's spot. Now, according to a report in Monday's New York Times, Tomlinson and other Bush appointees on the CPB board have turned their predatory gaze on National Public Radio and are pushing for - I kid you not - less news, more music.
Contrary to CPB's most important statutory mission - protecting public radio and television from political influence and interference, whether from right or left - Tomlinson has been focused on the politics of program content since ascending to the chairmanship two years ago.
All this reads like chapters from the Nixon attack plan against public TV and radio. Archives of administration memos and other papers from 1970, 1971, 1972 and 1973 document the systematic political interference of President Richard Nixon and his aides in the affairs of public broadcasting. The goal - in direct defiance of the law - was to ensure that program content served Nixon's political and policy objectives.
Clay T. Whitehead directed the Office of Telecommunications Policy in the Nixon White House. Operatives worked through it to pack the CPB board with sympathizers, then set about trying to discredit adversarial journalists, eliminate news programming and engineer the replacement of the CPB president and chairman. Their more blatantly corrupt schemes collapsed, however, when the new chairman, former Missouri Republican Congressman Thomas B. Curtis, turned out to be a man of integrity and principle who stood up to them.
Even so, the political thugs and convicted felons of the Nixon administration managed to leave public broadcasting saddled with a decentralized structure that has undermined its ability to serve viewers and program underwriters alike.
They might have had more success had they heeded the telecommunications office's general counsel, a sharp young conservative lawyer named Antonin Scalia. In an urgent 1971 memo to Whitehead, Scalia warned that administration efforts to interfere directly with the operations of public broadcasting were likely to fail and to become public. "Naturally, this is the worst possible outcome," he wrote. Earlier in the year, Scalia had advised that "the best possibility for White House influence (over CPB) is through the presidential appointees to the Board of Directors."
If it weren't so damaging, the hard right's obsession with public broadcasting would be merely pathetic. By commercial television and radio measures, after all, PBS and NPR audiences are minuscule. Focus more narrowly on the news and public affairs programming that whips right-wingers into a lather, and you're dealing in truly tiny percentages of the viewing/listening audience - notwithstanding the high quality of the product.
Yet instead of just sucking up their annoyance with something few people see or hear, conservatives pump their pulse rates into triple digits and bleat about being the poor victims of liberal media bias. You'd think they'd take at least some small measure of comfort from their control of the White House, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and, if their plan works, the federal courts.
Some content republished from
For the hard right, control of the government is not enough
By Eric Minc Of the Post-Dispatch 05/18/2005
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