Partisans of public broadcasting won a round last week when the full House of Representatives declined to follow the lead of its Appropriations Committee, which had slashed $100 million from the $400 million allocation to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Friends of Buster or Bird, perhaps, flooded congressional switchboards with pleas for reprieve, and the House restored the 25 percent cut.
But the battle is hardly over. For one thing, the House budget still excludes about $100 million for TV and radio upgrades and subsidies in the Ready to Learn program. And even if it appears that the world has been made safe again for antiques appraisers and big red dogs, they could occupy the only safe corners in public broadcasting. The day the House voted to rescind the cut, the CPB announced the appointment, as president and CEO, of Patricia Harrison, a former Visiting Fellow of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and Co-Chairman of the Republican National Committee.
By law, though, the position is supposed to be nonpartisan, and Harrison was the stated choice of CPB Chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the Bush Administration appointee who has done more to inject politics into public broadcasting than anyone previously. The former editor-in-chief at Reader's Digest not only has alleged "liberal bias" at National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System, he has enlisted associates from various outlets of the conservative movement to buttress his claims. Thanks to Tomlinson, NPR, in addition to an in-house ombudsman, has two additional ombudsmen vetting its work from either end of the political spectrum, which is nothing short of ridiculous.
As The New York Times reported last week, Tomlinson, without CPB board knowledge, retained a former employee of the National Journalism Center to research the work of Bill Moyers, former host of the PBS public-affairs program Now. That journalism center was founded in 1977 by the American Conservative Union and conservative columnist M. Stanton Evans, so it is hard to imagine the researcher, Fred Mann, was charged with an objective analysis.
Let's stipulate that Moyers, long ago Lyndon Johnson's press secretary, has a liberal point of view. Similarly, we might agree that William F. Buckley, who for years scissored political opponents on the PBS program Crossfire—without, we might add, significant complaints about bias—is a conservative. But sniffing out evidence of liberal bias has been a cause celebre in recent years for the conservative movement, usually by way of enumerating instances in which administration policies are questioned, as opposed to times when someone says something approving. Although it appears objective, this method is not a particularly useful index. For one thing, even Republicans are attacking administration policies these days. For another, it is the business of news and public affairs programs to raise questions about policy and politics. Ask Bill Clinton.
Nonetheless, PBS responded to Tomlinson's pressure in part by giving conservative gabber Tucker Carlson a show. That's fine. Surveys show that journalists in general lean left—being in the business of questioning authority will do that to you—and conservatives have every right to ask that media outlets, especially those publicly funded, do more to acknowledge their views. If that were the end of it, we'd have no problems. But the Bush Administration has made it a centerpiece of its conduct of public policy, almost from Day One, to substitute fiction for fact, propaganda for news. It has thus convinced its disciples to perceive the mere reporting of truthful information as acts of bias. And that appears to be behind the vetting of public-affairs reporting at PBS and NPR.
Traditional conservatives, at least, have a respectable argument against public broadcasting, as did their predecessors when the CPB was created in 1967. They argued then that the government had no business mucking around in broadcasting. Let the free market provide what people want to hear and watch. And they argue today that the market, with its 500-channel universe, provides plenty of choice unavailable to viewers trapped in the "vast wasteland" bounded by ABC, CBS and NBC 38 years ago.
This at least is an honest contention, but flawed. Ask yourself whatever happened to the Entertainment and Sports Network. A&E and Bravo, both formed as high-end cultural outlets, instead bring us endless true-crime narratives and makeover reality shows. Who else airs programs like Frontline, Nova and The American Experience? Where on the radio dial can you find hours of solid, serious news and public-affairs reporting? And no, Rush doesn't qualify.
But in the contemporary conservative outlook, NPR is the anti-Limbaugh, and taxpayers are subsidizing it. (I should note that in the past I have contributed commentaries to KNPR and to an East Coast NPR affiliate. Believe me, it's not money that moves me to pick up the cudgel for them.) As things get worse for the administration, as its fictions begin to breed particularly troublesome facts, it will ramp up its assault on the reporting of reality. It has already cowed network news and much of the "mainstream media." It cannot be allowed to strip public broadcasting of a core mission to report and analyze current affairs.
Big Bird might be safe for now. But the fight is far from over. We need to keep an eye on Big Brother.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.