Media Reform Group Calls For Ouster

But in those days – and this is what I wanted to share with Kenneth Tomlinson, who I have never met, and his colleagues on the CPB board — in those days there were still Republicans in America who did not march in ideological lockstep and who stood on principle against politicizing public television. The chairman of the public station in Dallas was an industrialist named Ralph Rogers, a Republican but no party hack, who saw the White House intimidation as an assault on freedom of the press and led a nationwide effort to stop it. The chairman at the time of the CPB was a former Republican Congressman, Thomas Curtis, from here in St. Louis – from here in Missouri, who was also a principled man. He resigned, claiming White House interference. Within a few months, the crisis was over. CPB maintained its independence, PBS grew in strength, and Richard Nixon would face impeachment and resign for violating the public trust and not just public broadcasting. Paradoxically, the very — talk about justice. In fact, I once asked a wise – a friend of mine, a wise old man in Washington, what he had learned from life, could he reduce it to one sentence? And he said, “Yes. There ain’t no justice in the world. Now, get on with it.”

But here was cosmic justice. The very Public Affairs Center for Television that Nixon had tried to kill, NPACT, put PBS on the map by re-broadcasting in prime time each day’s Watergate hearings, drawing huge ratings night after night and establishing PBS as an ally of democracy. We should still be doing that sort of thing. C-SPAN, bless its heart, shouldn’t be the only channel that lets us see how democracy works …

That was thirty-three years ago and I thought the current CPB board would like to hear and talk about the importance of standing up to political interference. I was wrong. They wouldn’t meet with me. I tried three times and failed three times, and it was all downhill after that. I was naive, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying out for the White House. But that’s what Kenneth Tomlinson has been doing. On Fox News this week he denied he’s carrying out a White House mandate or that he’s ever had any conversation with any Bush administration official about PBS. But The New York Times reports that he enlisted Karl Rove to help kill a proposal that would have put on the CPB board people with experience in local radio and television.

It was also reported that on the recommendation of administration officials, he hired a White House flack — I know the genre — named Mary Catherine Andrews, as a senior staff member at CPB. While she was still reporting to Karl Rove at the White House, she set up CPB’s new ombudsman office and had a hand in hiring the two people who will fill it, one of them who once worked for Tomlinson, the other a very respected journalist. But this is an anomaly. A political organization can’t have an ombudsman. CPB is not a journalistic or newsgathering organization. PBS can have one. WGBH can have one. WNET can have one. But for a political organization to have two ombudsmen or one ombudsman or a dozen? I would like to give Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t.

According to a book written about the Reader’s Digest when he was with – when he was its Editor-in-Chief, he surrounded himself with other right wingers, a pattern he’s now following for the staff at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I’ve already mentioned Miss Andrews. Well, for Acting President he hired Ken Ferree from the FCC who was Michael Powell’s enforcer when Powell was deciding how to go about allowing the big media companies to get even bigger. One of Ferree’s jobs, as Jeff Chester will say in his book coming out in the next several months, was to engage in tactics designed to dismiss any serious objection to more media monopolies. And according to Eric Alterman, Ferree was even more contemptuous than Michael Powell of public participation in the process of determining media ownership. It was Ferree who decided to issue a protective order designed to keep secret the market research on which the Republican majority on the commission based their vote to permit greater media consolidation.

Now, let me say, it is not likely that with a guy like that as the chief operating officer of the CPB you’re going to find any public television producer say, “Hey, let’s do something on how big media is affecting democracy.” Because what this leads to is preventive capitulation.