Public Broadcasting's Enemy Within

[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Editorial Staff]
[Commentary] As chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson proved to be a disastrous zealot. Internal investigators found he repeatedly broke federal law and ethics rules in overreaching his authority and packing the payroll with Republican ideologues. His actual job - to maintain a "heat shield" between public broadcasting and politics - was turned on its head. The scathing investigation concluded that Mr. Tomlinson was a beacon of partisanship, hiring GOP consultants as ludicrous bias-control monitors and recruiting Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, to be the corporation's new president. The inspector general's report is a case study of how dangerous ideological cronyism is as a substitute for nonpartisan expertise. Defenders of public broadcasting now must guard against still another conservative putsch - a Congressional move to cut financing for the corporation's $400 million budget of vital aid for local stations. This time, the "balance" zealots may resort to irony by citing the very chaos wrought by Mr. Tomlinson.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/opinion/28mon2.html
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* CPB chairman's unilateral actions to adjust PBS program politics exceeded his authority
http://www.current.org/

* Journal ignored specific charges raised by CPB inspector general to defend Tomlinson
http://mediamatters.org/items/200511210008