Oh, we still have some principled Republicans. It’s just that they’re often marginalized. I’ve seen it done to Wash. state’s Dan Evans, three-time governor and U.S. Senator, whose party refused to let him be a delegate to the nat’l GOP convention. Or the recall campaign against the current GOP secretary of state, Sam Reed, who insisted on being impartial throughout the recent gubernatorial recount challenges and court case. Today, Amy Goodman interviewed Bill Moyers for the hour. Moyers talked about the days when principled Republicans carried more weight:

BILL MOYERS: Kenneth Tomlinson is the first chairman of the CPB in my 35 years’ experience in Public Broadcasting who has set out to staff the CPB with partisan operatives of his own party.

Back in the 1970s, Richard Nixon and Patrick Buchanan, his communications aide, were unhappy with what Public Broadcasting was reporting, and they began to rail against Robert McNeil, who had come to Public Broadcasting, Sandy Vanocur, me, all professional journalists who were just trying to do our job. And Nixon and Buchanan tried to de-fund Public Broadcasting then, attacked it.

But at that time, principled Republicans, like Ralph Rogers from Dallas, who was a member of the Board of PBS, rose to the occasion, opposed his own party’s president, and beat back the efforts to under-fund and de-fund and eliminate Public Broadcasting. … Cont. below:

We had principled Republicans in those days, moderate Republicans who believed in the mandate of the CPB to keep us out of politics.


AMY GOODMAN: How did Nixon and Pat Buchanan, who’s big time on television today, how did they go after CPB 30 years ago?


BILL MOYERS: They went behind the scenes to try to eliminate the budget from their own budgeting process, and they then —


AMY GOODMAN: It had just been established.


BILL MOYERS: Yeah, it had just been established. And, well, we had set up an organization called NPACT, National Public Affairs Center for Television, to report on Washington as mainstream media were not reporting on Washington.

And they were reporting stories that — such as you do — that were not being reported in the regular press.

So Nixon didn’t like that. He accused, wrongly, falsely accused Public Broadcasting’s Robert McNeil and Sandy Vanocur and others of being biased against the administration, just because, as Tomlinson has done, they were reporting stories that the administration didn’t want reported.

And so they tried to de-fund it, tried to eliminate the funding, and then ran a vicious smear campaign behind the scenes, much of what Kenneth Tomlinson has done. This is what troubles me. Much of what he has done has been secret. He hasn’t told his staff. He’s circulated rumors about those of us in Public Broadcasting. He’s spoken strongly against us privately. He’s actually spread disinformation about us privately. This is unbecoming of the Chairman of CPB. …


Moyers on the founding of public broadcasting:

BILL MOYERS: … My message goes back to the beginning of Public Broadcasting. I was a young policy assistant in the White House of Lyndon Johnson, attended my first meeting to discuss the future of educational television in 1964 when I was 30 years old, to discuss what we were going to do about educational television, and I was present at the creation, and then by a series of serendipitous events after I left the White House to become publisher of Newsday, I wound up hosting a broadcast on Public Broadcasting in 1970, and I’ve been associated with it ever since. I care about this medium.


We established Public Broadcasting back in the 1960s because we believed there should be an alternative to commercial television and to commercials on television.

We thought commercial television was doing pretty well at what it was doing, but it was even then beginning to dumb down its programming to satisfy the largest common denominator. It had made its peace with the little lies and fantasies of merchandising. It treated Americans as consumers, not as citizens. So we started — Congress approved Public Broadcasting as an alternative to corporate and commercial broadcasting.


I still believe with all my heart that although — while there are so many more channels, we still need one system — people vote for their television.

Television is a great democracy. You can use that remote control and vote a change right away. We need one channel in there, such as you’re doing here.

In fact, Amy, it’s not because I’m here today, but I’ve long believed that Democracy Now! belongs on Public Broadcasting. You report the news that others are not reporting. You represent constituencies that are not represented in our programming.


Public Broadcasting has failed on many respects. We’ve not been enough of an alternative. We need a greater variety of voices on Public Broadcasting, conservative, liberal and beyond conservative and liberal.

But it’s still the best alternative we have for providing the American people with something other than what is driven by commercials, corporations, and the desire constantly to sell, sell, sell.

You cannot get anywhere in the Public Broadcasting universe the kind of information that you provided in the opening of your broadcast with your news summary. That’s not the news summary you’re going to get on CNN tonight or Fox News tonight or ABC or CBS. Public Broadcasting still unfulfilled, still flawed, still imperfect, my message is to remind people what’s at stake if we allow it to go under.

Transcript or audio/video of full interview

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