Bill Moyers' speech to the National Conference for Media Reform

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Bill Moyers' speech to the National Conference for Media Reform

 

 

From Free Press, May 16, 2005

By Bill Moyers

 

The following is the prepared text for Bill Moyers' speech to the

National Conference for Media Reform on May 15, 2005. The event in St.

Louis was organized and hosted by Free Press (www.freepress.net).

 

 

Click here to listen an audio recording of the speech.

 

Click here to watch a video of the speech.

 

To join Free Press' campaign to put the public back into PBS, please

add your name to our petition calling for the resignation of Kenneth

Tomlinson and the creation of a series of town meetings across the

country on the future of public broadcasting.

 

 

I CAN'T IMAGINE BETTER COMPANY ON THIS BEAUTIFUL SUNDAY MORNING IN ST.

LOUIS. You're church for me today, and there's no congregation in the

country where I would be more likely to find more kindred souls than

are gathered here.

 

There are so many different vocations and callings in this room — so

many different interests and aspirations of people who want to reform

the media — that only a presiding bishop like Bob McChesney with his

great ecumenical heart could bring us together for a weekend like this.

 

What joins us all under Bob's embracing welcome is our commitment to

public media. Pat Aufderheide got it right, I think, in the recent

issue of In These Times when she wrote: " This is a moment when public

media outlets can make a powerful case for themselves. Public radio,

public TV, cable access, public DBS channels, media arts centers,

youth media projects, nonprofit Internet news services … low-power

radio and webcasting are all part of a nearly invisible feature of

today's media map: the public media sector. They exist not to make a

profit, not to push an ideology, not to serve customers, but to create

a public — a group of people who can talk productively with those who

don't share their views, and defend the interests of the people who

have to live with the consequences of corporate and governmental power. "

 

She gives examples of the possibilities. " Look at what happened, " she

said, " when thousands of people who watched Stanley Nelson's The

Murder of Emmett Till on their public television channels joined a

postcard campaign that re-opened the murder case after more than half

a century. Look at NPR's courageous coverage of the Iraq war, an

expensive endeavor that wins no points from this administration. Look

at Chicago Access Network's Community Forum, where nonprofits

throughout the region can showcase their issues and find volunteers. "

 

The public media, she argues, for all our flaws, are a very important

resource in a noisy and polluted information environment.

 

You can also take wings reading Jason Miller's May 4 article on Z Net

about the mainstream media. While it is true that much of the

mainstream media is corrupted by the influence of government and

corporate interests, Miller writes, there are still men and women in

the mainstream who practice a high degree of journalistic integrity

and who do challenge us with their stories and analysis.

 

But the real hope " lies within the Internet with its 2 billion or more

Web sites providing a wealth of information drawn from almost

unlimited resources that span the globe. … If knowledge is power,

one's capacity to increase that power increases exponentially through

navigation of the Internet for news and information. "

 

Surely this is one issue that unites us as we leave here today. The

fight to preserve the Web from corporate gatekeepers joins media,

reformers, producers and educators — and it's a fight that has only

just begun.

 

I want to tell you about another fight we're in today. The story I've

come to share with you goes to the core of our belief that the quality

of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined. I can

tell this story because I've been living it. It's been in the news

this week, including reports of more attacks on a single journalist —

yours truly — by the right-wing media and their allies at the

Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

 

As some of you know, CPB was established almost 40 years ago to set

broad policy for public broadcasting and to be a firewall between

political influence and program content. What some on this board are

now doing today — led by its chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson — is too

important, too disturbing and yes, even too dangerous for a gathering

like this not to address.

 

We're seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age-old ambition of

power and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the

stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.

 

Let me assure you that I take in stride attacks by the radical

right-wingers who have not given up demonizing me although I retired

over six months ago. They've been after me for years now, and I

suspect they will be stomping on my grave to make sure I don't come

back from the dead.

 

I should remind them, however, that one of our boys pulled it off some

2,000 years ago — after the Pharisees, Sadducees and Caesar's

surrogates thought they had shut him up for good. Of course I won't be

expecting that kind of miracle, but I should put my detractors on

notice: They might just compel me out of the rocking chair and back

into the anchor chair.

 

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the

government to threaten and intimidate. I mean the people who are

hollowing out middle-class security even as they enlist the sons and

daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi

winds up controlling Iraq's oil. I mean the people who turn

faith-based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious

to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege

and power picking their pockets. I mean the people who squelch free

speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their

orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation

becomes unpatriotic heresy.

 

That's who I mean. And if that's editorializing, so be it. A free

press is one where it's OK to state the conclusion you're led to by

the evidence.

 

One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW

didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those

rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and

conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their

job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely

give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

 

Jonathan Mermin writes about this in a recent essay in World Policy

Journal. (You'll also want to read his book Debating War and Peace,

Media Coverage of US Intervention in the Post Vietnam Era.)

 

Mermin quotes David Ignatius of the Washington Post on why the deep

interests of the American public are so poorly served by Beltway

journalism. The " rules of our game, " says Ignatius, " make it hard for

us to tee up an issue … without a news peg. " He offers a case in

point: the debacle of America's occupation of Iraq. " If Senator so and

so hasn't criticized postwar planning for Iraq, " says Ignatius, " then

it's hard for a reporter to write a story about that. "

 

Mermin also quotes public television's Jim Lehrer acknowledging that

unless an official says something is so, it isn't news. Why were

journalists not discussing the occupation of Iraq? Because, says

Lehrer, " the word occupation … was never mentioned in the run-up to

the war. " Washington talked about the invasion as " a war of

liberation, not a war of occupation, so as a consequence, " those of us

in journalism never even looked at the issue of occupation. "

 

" In other words, " says Jonathan Mermin, " if the government isn't

talking about it, we don't report it. " He concludes: " [Lehrer's]

somewhat jarring declaration, one of many recent admissions by

journalists that their reporting failed to prepare the public for the

calamitous occupation that has followed the `liberation' of Iraq,

reveals just how far the actual practice of American journalism has

deviated from the First Amendment ideal of a press that is independent

of the government. "

 

Take the example (also cited by Mermin) of Charles J. Hanley. Hanley

is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Associated Press, whose

fall 2003 story on the torture of Iraqis in American prisons — before

a U.S. Army report and photographs documenting the abuse surfaced —

was ignored by major American newspapers. Hanley attributes this lack

of interest to the fact that " it was not an officially sanctioned

story that begins with a handout from an official source. "

 

Furthermore, Iraqis recounting their own personal experience of Abu

Ghraib simply did not have the credibility with Beltway journalists of

American officials denying that such things happened. Judith Miller of

the New York Times, among others, relied on the credibility of

official but unnamed sources when she served essentially as the

government stenographer for claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass

destruction.

 

These " rules of the game " permit Washington officials to set the

agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too often simply to

recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds

to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and

viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors

attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to

provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and

which are misleading.

 

I decided long ago that this wasn't healthy for democracy. I came to

see that " news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else

is publicity. " In my documentaries – whether on the Watergate scandals

30 years ago or the Iran-Contra conspiracy 20 years ago or Bill

Clinton's fundraising scandals 10 years ago or, five years ago, the

chemical industry's long and despicable cover-up of its cynical and

unspeakable withholding of critical data about its toxic products from

its workers, I realized that investigative journalism could not be a

collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity is

not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions,

leaving the viewer to split the difference.

 

I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the

object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies as

well as the Big Lie of the people in power. In no way does this permit

journalists to make accusations and allegations. It means, instead,

making sure that your reporting and your conclusions can be nailed to

the post with confirming evidence.

 

This is always hard to do, but it has never been harder than today.

Without a trace of irony, the powers-that-be have appropriated the

newspeak vernacular of George Orwell's 1984. They give us a program

vowing " No Child Left Behind, " while cutting funds for educating

disadvantaged kids. They give us legislation cheerily calling for

" Clear Skies " and " Healthy Forests " that give us neither. And that's

just for starters.

 

In Orwell's 1984, the character Syme, one of the writers of that

totalitarian society's dictionary, explains to the protagonist

Winston, " Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow

the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by

the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be

alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?

The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be

no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking —

not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. "

 

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on

partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people

made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda,

is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical.

That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy — or worse.

 

I learned about this the hard way. I grew up in the South, where the

truth about slavery, race, and segregation had been driven from the

pulpits, driven from the classrooms and driven from the newsrooms. It

took a bloody Civil War to bring the truth home, and then it took

another hundred years for the truth to make us free.

 

Then I served in the Johnson administration. Imbued with Cold War

orthodoxy and confident that " might makes right, " we circled the

wagons, listened only to each other, and pursued policies the evidence

couldn't carry. The results were devastating for Vietnamese and Americans.

 

I brought all of this to the task when PBS asked me after 9/11 to

start a new weekly broadcast. They wanted us to make it different from

anything else on the air — commercial or public broadcasting. They

asked us to tell stories no one else was reporting and to offer a

venue to people who might not otherwise be heard.

 

That wasn't a hard sell. I had been deeply impressed by studies

published in leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals by a team of

researchers led by Vassar College sociologist William Hoynes.

Extensive research on the content of public television over a decade

found that political discussions on our public affairs programs

generally included a limited set of voices that offer a narrow range

of perspectives on current issues and events.

 

Instead of far-ranging discussions and debates, the kind that might

engage viewers as citizens, not simply as audiences, this research

found that public affairs programs on PBS stations were populated by

the standard set of elite news sources. Whether government officials

and Washington journalists (talking about political strategy) or

corporate sources (talking about stock prices or the economy from the

investor's viewpoint), public television, unfortunately, all too often

was offering the same kind of discussions, and a similar brand of

insider discourse, that is featured regularly on commercial television.

 

Who didn't appear was also revealing. Hoynes and his team found that

in contrast to the conservative mantra that public television

routinely featured the voices of anti-establishment critics,

" alternative perspectives were rare on public television and were

effectively drowned out by the stream of government and corporate

views that represented the vast majority of sources on our broadcasts. "

 

The so-called experts who got most of the face time came primarily

from mainstream news organizations and Washington think tanks rather

than diverse interests. Economic news, for example, was almost

entirely refracted through the views of business people, investors and

business journalists. Voices outside the corporate/Wall Street

universe — nonprofessional workers, labor representatives, consumer

advocates and the general public were rarely heard. In sum, these two

studies concluded, the economic coverage was so narrow that the views

and the activities of most citizens became irrelevant.

 

All this went against the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 that created

the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I know. I was there. As a

young policy assistant to President Johnson, I attended my first

meeting to discuss the future of public broadcasting in 1964 in the

office of the Commissioner of Education. I know firsthand that the

Public Broadcasting Act was meant to provide an alternative to

commercial television and to reflect the diversity of the American people.

 

This, too, was on my mind when we assembled the team for NOW. It was

just after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We agreed on two priorities.

First, we wanted to do our part to keep the conversation of democracy

going. That meant talking to a wide range of people across the

spectrum — left, right and center.

 

It meant poets, philosophers, politicians, scientists, sages and

scribblers. It meant Isabel AlIende, the novelist, and Amity Shlaes,

the columnist for the Financial Times. It meant the former nun and

best-selling author Karen Armstrong, and it meant the right-wing

evangelical columnist Cal Thomas. It meant Arundhati Roy from India,

Doris Lessing from London, David Suzuki from Canada, and Bernard

Henry-Levi from Paris. It also meant two successive editors of the

Wall Street Journal, Robert Bartley and Paul Gigot, the editor of The

Economist, Bill Emmott, The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel and the

L.A. Weekly's John Powers.

 

It means liberals like Frank Wu, Ossie Davis and Gregory Nava, and

conservatives like Frank Gaffney, Grover Norquist, and Richard

Viguerie. It meant Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Bishop Wilton Gregory

of the Catholic Bishops conference in this country. It meant the

conservative Christian activist and lobbyist, Ralph Reed, and the

dissident Catholic Sister Joan Chittister. We threw the conversation

of democracy open to all comers.

 

Most of those who came responded the same way that Ron Paul, the

Republican and Libertarian congressman from Texas, did when he wrote

me after his appearance, " I have received hundreds of positive e-mails

from your viewers. I appreciate the format of your program, which

allows time for a full discussion of ideas. … I'm tired of political

shows featuring two guests shouting over each other and offering the

same arguments. … NOW was truly refreshing. "

 

Hold your applause because that's not the point of the story. We had a

second priority. We intended to do strong, honest and accurate

reporting, telling stories we knew people in high places wouldn't like.

 

I told our producers and correspondents that in our field reporting

our job was to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth. This

was all the more imperative in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

America could be entering a long war against an elusive and stateless

enemy with no definable measure of victory and no limit to its

duration, cost or foreboding fear. The rise of a homeland security

state meant government could justify extraordinary measures in

exchange for protecting citizens against unnamed, even unproven, threats.

 

Furthermore, increased spending during a national emergency can

produce a spectacle of corruption behind a smokescreen of secrecy. I

reminded our team of the words of the news photographer in Tom

Stoppard's play who said, " People do terrible things to each other,

but it's worse when everyone is kept in the dark. "

 

I also reminded them of how the correspondent and historian Richard

Reeves answered a student who asked him to define real news. " Real

news, " Reeves responded, " is the news you and I need to keep our

freedoms. "

 

For these reasons and in that spirit, we went about reporting on

Washington as no one else in broadcasting — except occasionally 60

Minutes — was doing. We reported on the expansion of the Justice

Department's power of surveillance. We reported on the escalating

Pentagon budget and expensive weapons that didn't work. We reported on

how campaign contributions influenced legislation and policy to skew

resources to the comfortable and well-connected while our troops were

fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq with inadequate training and armor.

We reported on how the Bush administration was shredding the Freedom

of Information Act. We went around the country to report on how

closed-door, backroom deals in Washington were costing ordinary

workers and tax payers their livelihood and security. We reported on

offshore tax havens that enable wealthy and powerful Americans to

avoid their fair share of national security and the social contract.

 

And always — because what people know depends on who owns the press —

we kept coming back to the media business itself, to how mega media

corporations were pushing journalism further and further down the

hierarchy of values, how giant radio cartels were silencing critics

while shutting communities off from essential information, and how the

mega media companies were lobbying the FCC for the right to grow ever

more powerful.

 

The broadcast caught on. Our ratings grew every year. There was even a

spell when we were the only public affairs broadcast on PBS whose

audience was going up instead of down.

 

Our journalistic peers took notice. The Los Angeles Times said, " NOW's

team of reporters has regularly put the rest of the media to shame,

pursuing stories few others bother to touch. "

 

The Philadelphia Inquirer said our segments on the sciences, the arts,

politics and the economy were " provocative public television at its best. "

 

The Austin American-Statesman called NOW, " the perfect antidote to

today's high pitched decibel level, a smart, calm, timely news program. "

 

Frazier Moore of the Associated Press said we were hard-edged when

appropriate but never Hardball. " Don't expect combat. Civility reigns. "

 

And the Baton Rouge Advocate said, " NOW invites viewers to consider

the deeper implication of the daily headlines, " drawing on " a wide

range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the

political left or right. "

 

Let me repeat that: NOW draws on " a wide range of viewpoints which

transcend the typical labels of the political left or right. "

 

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 had been prophetic. Open public

television to the American people — offer diverse interests, ideas and

voices … be fearless in your belief in democracy — and they will come.

 

Hold your applause — that's not the point of the story.

 

The point of the story is something only a handful of our team,

including my wife and partner Judith Davidson Moyers, and I knew at

the time — that the success of NOW's journalism was creating a

backlash in Washington.

 

The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of

the Republican Party became. 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 is the point of my story: Ideologues don't want you to go beyond

the typical labels of left and right. They embrace a world view that

can't be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the

contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and

when it doesn't, God forbid.

 

Never mind that their own stars were getting a fair shake on NOW:

Gigot, Viguerie, David Keene of the American Conservative Union,

Stephen Moore, then with the Club for Growth, and others. No, our

reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn't the

party line. It wasn't that we were getting it wrong. Only three times

in three years did we err factually, and in each case we corrected

those errors as soon as we confirmed their inaccuracy. The problem was

that we were telling stories that partisans in power didn't want told

… we were getting it right, not right-wing.

 

I've always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right

wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their

legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that

ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the

great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it's

no longer an eagle and it's going to crash.

 

My occasional commentaries got to them as well. Although apparently he

never watched the broadcast (I guess he couldn't take the diversity),

Sen. Trent Lott came out squealing like a stuck pig when after the

midterm elections in 2002 I described what was likely to happen now

that all three branches of government were about to be controlled by

one party dominated by the religious, corporate and political right.

 

Instead of congratulating the winners for their election victory as

some network broadcasters had done — or celebrating their victory as

Fox, the Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, talk radio and other

partisan Republican journalists had done — I provided a little

independent analysis of what the victory meant. And I did it the

old-fashioned way: I looked at the record, took the winners at their

word, and drew the logical conclusion that they would use power as

they always said they would. And I set forth this conclusion in my

usual modest Texas way.

 

Events since then have confirmed the accuracy of what I said, but, to

repeat, being right is exactly what the right doesn't want journalists

to be.

 

Strange things began to happen. Friends in Washington called to say

that they had heard of muttered threats that the PBS reauthorization

would be held off " unless Moyers is dealt with. " The chairman of the

Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, was said to be

quite agitated. Apparently there was apoplexy in the right-wing aerie

when I closed the broadcast one Friday night by putting an American

flag in my lapel and said – well, here's exactly what I said:

 

" I wore my flag tonight. First time. Until now I haven't thought it

necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone

to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties,

speak my mind, and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans.

 

" Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been

born in a country whose institutions sustained me, whose armed forces

protected me, and whose ideals inspired me; I offered my heart's

affections in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on

my chest than it did to pin my mother's picture on my lapel to prove

her son's love. Mother knew where I stood; so does my country. I even

tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15.

 

" So what's this doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The

flag's been hijacked and turned into a logo — the trademark of a

monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official

chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the good housekeeping

seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush

and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration's patriotism

is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity

from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of

the time in China when I saw Mao's little red book on every official's

desk, omnipresent and unread.

 

" But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in

Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and

running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as

un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows

disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They're in the

same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and

prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more

spending on war.

 

" So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their

lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks,

or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don't have to make it,

or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing

(after they first stash the cash). I put it on to remind myself that

not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what

Bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the

government. And it reminds me that it's not un-American to think that

war — except in self-defense — is a failure of moral imagination,

political nerve, and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to

your government can mean standing up for your country. "

 

That did it. That — and our continuing reporting on overpricing at

Haliburton, chicanery on K Street, and the heavy, if divinely guided

hand, of Tom DeLay.

 

When Senator Lott protested that the Corporation for Public

Broadcasting " has not seemed willing to deal with Bill Moyers, " a new

member of the board, a Republican fundraiser named Cheryl Halperin,

who had been appointed by President Bush, agreed that CPB needed more

power to do just that sort of thing. She left no doubt about the kind

of penalty she would like to see imposed on malefactors like Moyers.

 

As rumors circulated about all this, I asked to meet with the CPB

board to hear for myself what was being said. I thought it would be

helpful for someone like me, who had been present at the creation and

part of the system for almost 40 years, to talk about how CPB had been

intended to be a heat shield to protect public broadcasters from

exactly this kind of intimidation.

 

After all, I'd been there at the time of Richard Nixon's attempted

coup. In those days, public television had been really feisty and

independent, and often targeted for attacks. A Woody Allen special

that poked fun at Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration had

actually been cancelled. The White House had been so outraged over a

documentary called the " Banks and the Poor " that PBS was driven to

adopt new guidelines. That didn't satisfy Nixon, and when public

television hired two NBC reporters — Robert McNeil and Sander Vanoucur

to co-anchor some new broadcasts, it was, for Nixon, the last straw.

According to White House memos at the time, he was determined to " get

the left-wing commentators who are cutting us up off public television

at once — indeed, yesterday if possible. "

 

Sound familiar?

 

Nixon vetoed the authorization for CPB with a message written in part

by his sidekick Pat Buchanan, who in a private memo had castigated

Vanocur, MacNeil, Washington Week in Review, Black Journal and Bill

Moyers as " unbalanced against the administration. "

 

It does sound familiar.

 

I always knew Nixon would be back. I just didn't know this time he

would be the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

 

Buchanan and Nixon succeeded in cutting CPB funding for all public

affairs programming except for Black Journal. They knocked out

multiyear funding for the National Public Affairs Center for

Television, otherwise known as NPACT. And they voted to take away from

the PBS staff the ultimate responsibility for the production of

programming.

 

But in those days — and this is what I wanted to share with Kenneth

Tomlinson and his colleagues on the CPB board — 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 of CPB was former Republican Congressman Thomas Curtis,

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 soon

face impeachment and resign for violating the public trust, not just

public broadcasting.

 

Paradoxically, the very National Public Affairs Center for Television

that Nixon had tried to kill — NPACT — put PBS on the map by

rebroadcasting in primetime 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.

 

That was 33 years ago. 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 it was all downhill after that.

 

I was na've, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman,

Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White

House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. But that's what

Kenneth Tomlinson has done.

 

On Fox News this week he denied that he's carrying out a White House

mandate or that he's ever had any conversations with any Bush

administration official about PBS. But the New York Times reported

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.

The Times also reported that " on the recommendation of administration

officials " Tomlinson hired a White House flack (I know the genre)

named Mary Catherine Andrews as a senior CPB staff member. While she

was still reporting to Karl Rove at the White House, Andrews set up

CPB's new ombudsman's office and had a hand in hiring the two people

who will fill it, one of whom once worked for … you guessed it …

Kenneth Tomlinson.

 

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 its Editor-in-Chief, he surrounded himself with other

right-wingers — a pattern he's now following at the Corporation for

Public Broadcasting.

 

There is Ms. Andrews from the White House. 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. According to a forthcoming book, one of Ferree's

jobs was to engage in tactics designed to dismiss any serious

objection to 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. Alterman identifies

Ferree as the FCC staffer 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.

 

It's not likely that with guys like this running the CPB some public

television producer is going to say, " Hey, let's do something on how

big media is affecting democracy. "

 

Call it preventive capitulation.

 

As everyone knows, Mr. Tomlinson also put up a considerable sum of

money, reportedly over $5 million, for a new weekly broadcast

featuring Paul Gigot and the editorial board of the Wall Street

Journal. Gigot is a smart journalist, a sharp editor, and a fine

fellow. I had him on NOW several times and even proposed that he

become a regular contributor. The conversation of democracy —

remember? All stripes.

 

But I confess to some puzzlement that the Wall Street Journal, which

in the past editorialized to cut PBS off the public tap, is now being

subsidized by American taxpayers although its parent company, Dow

Jones, had revenues in just the first quarter of this year of $400

million. I thought public television was supposed to be an alternative

to commercial media, not a funder of it.

 

But in this weird deal, you get a glimpse of the kind of programming

Mr. Tomlinson apparently seems to prefer. Alone of the big major

newspapers, the Wall Street Journal has no op-ed page where different

opinions can compete with its right-wing editorials. The Journal's PBS

broadcast is just as homogenous –- right- wingers talking to each

other. Why not $5 million to put the editors of The Nation on PBS? Or

Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! You balance right-wing talk with

left-wing talk.

 

There's more. Only two weeks ago did we learn that Mr. Tomlinson had

spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor who would watch my show

and report on political bias. That's right. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson spent

$10,000 of your money to hire a guy to watch NOW to find out who my

guests were and what my stories were. Ten thousand dollars.

 

Gee, Ken, for $2.50 a week, you could pick up a copy of TV Guide on

the newsstand. A subscription is even cheaper, and I would have sent

you a coupon that can save you up to 62 percent.

 

For that matter, Ken, all you had to do was watch the show yourself.

You could have made it easier with a double Jim Beam, your favorite.

Or you could have gone online where the listings are posted. Hell, you

could have called me — collect — and I would have told you.

 

Ten thousand dollars. That would have bought five tables at Thursday

night's " Conservative Salute for Tom DeLay. " Better yet, that ten

grand would pay for the books in an elementary school classroom or an

upgrade of its computer lab.

 

But having sent that cash, what did he find? Only Mr. Tomlinson knows.

He's apparently decided not to share the results with his staff, or

his board or leak it to Robert Novak. The public paid for it — but Ken

Tomlinson acts as if he owns it.

 

In a May 10 op-ed piece, in Reverend Moon's conservative Washington

Times, Tomlinson maintained he had not released the findings because

public broadcasting is such a delicate institution that he did not

want to " damage public broadcasting's image with controversy. " Where I

come from in Texas, we shovel that kind of stuff every day.

 

As we learned only this week, that's not the only news Mr. Tomlinson

tried to keep to himself. As reported by Jeff Chester's Center for

Digital Democracy (of which I am a supporter), there were two public

opinion surveys commissioned by CPB but not released to the media —

not even to PBS and NPR. According to a source who talked to

Salon.com, " The first results were too good and [Tomlinson] didn't

believe them. After the Iraq War, the board commissioned another round

of polling, and they thought they'd get worse results. "

 

But they didn't. The data revealed that, in reality, public

broadcasting has an 80 percent favorable rating and that " the majority

of the U.S. adult population does not believe that the news and

information programming on public broadcasting is biased. " In fact,

more than half believed PBS provided more in-depth and trustworthy

news and information than the networks and 55 percent said PBS was

" fair and balanced. "

 

Tomlinson is the man, by the way, who was running The Voice of America

back in 1984 when a partisan named Charlie Wick was politicizing the

United States Information Agency of which Voice of America was a part.

It turned out there was a blacklist of people who had been removed

from the list of prominent Americans sent abroad to lecture on behalf

of America and the USIA. What's more, it was discovered that evidence

as to how those people were chosen to be on the blacklist, more than

700 documents had been shredded. Among those on the blacklists of

journalists, writers, scholars and politicians were dangerous

left-wing subversives like Walter Cronkite, James Baldwin, Gary Hart,

Ralph Nader, Ben Bradlee, Coretta Scott King and David Brinkley.

 

The person who took the fall for the blacklist was another

right-winger. He resigned. Shortly thereafter, so did Kenneth

Tomlinson, who had been one of the people in the agency with the

authority to see the lists of potential speakers and allowed to strike

people's names. Let me be clear about this: There is no record,

apparently, of what Ken Tomlinson did. We don't know whether he

supported or protested the blacklisting of so many American liberals.

Or what he thinks of it now.

 

But I had hoped Bill O'Reilly would have asked him about it when he

appeared on The O'Reilly Factor this week. He didn't. Instead,

Tomlinson went on attacking me with O'Reilly egging him on, and he

went on denying he was carrying out a partisan mandate despite

published reports to the contrary. The only time you could be sure he

was telling the truth was at the end of the broadcast when he said to

O'Reilly, " We love your show. "

 

We love your show.

 

I wrote Kenneth Tomlinson on Friday and asked him to sit down with me

for one hour on PBS and talk about all this. I suggested that he

choose the moderator and the guidelines.

 

There is one other thing in particular I would like to ask him about.

In his op-ed essay this week in Washington Times, Ken Tomlinson tells

of a phone call from an old friend complaining about my bias. Wrote

Mr. Tomlinson: " The friend explained that the foundation he heads made

a six-figure contribution to his local television station for digital

conversion. But he declared there would be no more contributions until

something was done about the network's bias. "

 

Apparently that's Kenneth Tomlinson's method of governance. Money

talks and buys the influence it wants.

 

I would like to ask him to listen to a different voice.

 

This letter came to me last year from a woman in New York, five pages

of handwriting. She said, among other things, that " after the worst

sneak attack in our history, there's not been a moment to reflect, a

moment to let the horror resonate, a moment to feel the pain and

regroup as humans. No, since I lost my husband on 9/11, not only our

family's world, but the whole world seems to have gotten even worse

than that tragic day. "

 

She wanted me to know that on 9/11 her husband was not on duty. " He

was home with me having coffee. My daughter and grandson, living only

five blocks from the Towers, had to be evacuated with masks — terror

all around. … My other daughter, near the Brooklyn Bridge … my son in

high school. But my Charlie took off like a lightning bolt to be with

his men from the Special Operations Command. `Bring my gear to the

plaza,' he told his aide immediately after the first plane struck the

North Tower. … He took action based on the responsibility he felt for

his job and his men and for those Towers that he loved. "

 

In the FDNY, she said, chain-of- command rules extend to every captain

of every fire house in the city. If anything happens in the firehouse

— at any time — even if the captain isn't on duty or on vacation —

that captain is responsible for everything that goes on there 24/7. "

 

So she asked: " Why is this administration responsible for nothing? All

that they do is pass the blame. This is not leadership. … Watch

everyone pass the blame again in this recent torture case [Abu Ghraib]

of Iraqi prisons … "

 

And then she wrote: " We need more programs like yours to wake America

up. … Such programs must continue amidst the sea of false images and

name-calling that divide America now. … Such programs give us hope

that search will continue to get this imperfect human condition on to

a higher plane. So thank you and all of those who work with you.

Without public broadcasting, all we would call news would be merely

carefully controlled propaganda. "

 

Enclosed with the letter was a check made out to " Channel 13 — NOW "

for $500. I keep a copy of that check above my desk to remind me of

what journalism is about. Kenneth Tomlinson has his demanding donors.

I'll take the widow's mite any day.

 

Someone has said recently that the great raucous mob that is democracy

is rarely heard and that it's not just the fault of the current

residents of the White House and the capital. There's too great a

chasm between those of us in this business and those who depend on TV

and radio as their window to the world. We treat them too much as an

audience and not enough as citizens. They're invited to look through

the window but too infrequently to come through the door and to

participate, to make public broadcasting truly public. "

 

To that end, five public interest groups including Common Cause and

Consumers Union will be holding informational sessions around the

country to " take public broadcasting back " — to take it back from

threats, from interference, from those who would tell us we can only

think what they command us to think.

 

It's a worthy goal.

 

We're big kids; we can handle controversy and diversity, whether it's

political or religious points of view or two loving lesbian moms and

their kids, visited by a cartoon rabbit. We are not too fragile or

insecure to see America and the world entire for all their magnificent

and sometimes violent confusion. " There used to be a thing or a

commodity we put great store by, " John Steinbeck wrote. " It was called

the people. "