Public broadcasting wars

Ever since its inception in 1967 under the Lyndon Johnson administration, conservative critics have correctly perceived public broadcasting as heavily biased to the left.

Based on the notion that taxpayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize partisan political views they disagree with, there have been efforts off and on since the Nixon years to kill taxpayer funding for public broadcasting.

In the early years, when there were only three major TV networks, PBS was defended on the grounds that it gave viewers a fourth choice. Today, with so many Americans having cable access to scores of TV channels, that defense is no longer credible. Yet, PBS and National Public Radio, despite their frequent on-air fund-raising drives, still receive taxpayer money through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting - $387 million this year.

Veteran journalist Kenneth Tomlinson is a former Reader's Digest editor-in-chief who was appointed to the CPB board by President Bill Clinton and elevated to CPB chairman by President George W. Bush. Tomlinson quickly became aware that much of PBS' and NPR's news programming was far-left propaganda.

The CPB chairman made clear he wasn't referring to popular balanced programs like Jim Lehrer's NewsHour and Washington Week in Review. He was referring to some pro-Palestinian shows with an anti-Semitic taint and the ludicrous blatherings of Bill Moyers on Now.

Before he passed himself off as a "distinguished journalist," Moyers was Lyndon Johnson's hatchet-man who earned his hard-left stripes spreading vicious lies about Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign.

Tomlinson does not seek to get rid of any left-wing programming, and that includes Now, which has a new host since Moyers left to develop a new PBS series.

Instead, Tomlinson seeks to balance the Moyers-type liberal programs with some conservative ones - and that has thrown the public broadcasting establishment into a frenzy. They're accusing Tomlinson of being a stooge for the White House - of trying to change PBS into an organ of right-wing propaganda. Can you believe it?

Here's what Moyers said about Tomlinson's policies: "The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party gets. That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth."

This points up the problem with people like Moyers. They are blind to their own biases. They really do believe they are objective, fair and nonpartisan. It's those who don't think as they do who are partisan, lying hacks.

Tomlinson is not looking to use CPB's purse-strings to revamp PBS' ideology from liberal to conservative. He says that's the last thing he wants to do.

He seeks conservative balance to broaden public broadcasting's appeal, thereby generating more federal funding for it. If both liberals and conservatives support PBS and NPR, their fund-raising drives will be more successful too.

Clearly, Tomlinson is doing what's right as CPB chairman, but he's on the wrong track anyway. Public broadcasting should still be spun off into the private sector as conservatives have been urging for decades.