mediacrit.com

It seems that every ten years or so, a group in Washington, D.C. tries to either weaken or destroy our nation’s public broadcasting system.

In the 1970s, it was President Richard Nixon. Apparently, trying to cover-up the rising Watergate scandal didn’t keep the Nixon White House busy enough. Nixon wanted to undermine the independent news and public affairs programming at PBS, because he didn’t like their critical reporting. So, he vetoed the two-year budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and tried to stack the board with far-right conservatives.

In the 1980s, it was President Reagan, cutting CPB’s budget. In the 1990s, it was Newt Gingrich, wanting to completely cancel funding to the CPB. And now, today, it’s happening again, with a move by the Bush administration and some of its allies to cut 25 percent of the CPB’s budget and politicize its board.

The proposed reduction would hurt local stations, too, cutting $555,000 from Iowa Public Television, $75,000 from WOI, and more from other Iowa public radio stations. Wayne Jarvis of KUNI/KHKE in Cedar Falls said “we have already cut it to the bone” after the station lost $250,000 in state funding two years ago.

Although Congressional leaders supporting the cuts tried to rationalize that money is tight in Washington, what’s $100 million to a government that spends $177 million a day in Iraq? No, this is clearly monkey business, trying to get public broadcasters to back off any criticism of the current administration.

This isn’t how public broadcasting is supposed to work. Congress created the CPB in 1967 as an independent, nonprofit corporation that provides support for public television and radio and works as a firewall between politicians and programmers. Last year, the federal government provided $400 million (less than $2 from each citizen) in funding to the CPB. Most of that money gets redistributed directly to member stations, with 75 percent of it going to PBS affiliates and 25 percent to NPR affiliates.

The current attack on public broadcasting is like 1972 all over again. That is, like Nixon’s White House, this administration wants to intimidate and silence news and public affairs programs that are sometimes critical of them. And this time, the White House has an insider – CPB chairman Kenneth Tomlinson – on their side, as Tomlinson injects partisan politics into the very entity he is supposed protect. At the top of his list is NOW, a weekly news program that until this year was one hour long and hosted by veteran reporter Bill Moyers.

The New York Times recently revealed that Tomlinson paid a researcher more than $14,000 to secretly analyze the content of NOW for political bias. When he found out about this, Moyers responded that Tomlinson could have saved the money by just watching the show, calling Moyers, or picking up a copy to TV Guide to find out the stories and guests of NOW. After Moyers’ retirement from the show last year, NOW was shortened to 30 minutes. Moreover, Tomlinson championed a new PBS program featuring the conservative editorial board of Wall Street Journal.

Ironically, Moyers, an admitted liberal, routinely welcomed conservatives on his show, including Richard Vigurie, Ralph Reed, Grover Nordquist, Stephen Moore, and even the Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot.

And here’s the latest: Tomlinson is pushing a political operative, Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, as his top candidate for the next president of CPB. This action goes against the spirit, if not the letter of the law, of the CPB, which says “The Corporation may not contribute to or otherwise support any political party or candidate for elective public office.”

In a recent Talk of Iowa program on WSUI (full disclosure: I was a panelist on this June 20, 2005 program, too), U.S. Rep. Jim Leach, a Republican from Iowa City and long-time supporter of CPB funding, argued that public broadcasting is important to America, and when its news programs have valid criticism of our government, it’s a good thing. “If you think about the reverse – if public broadcasting would only take any administration’s line, that would be a great disservice to the country, and you’d call it propaganda broadcasting.”

See www.current.org and www.freepress.net for more information on the state of public broadcasting and how you can get involved.