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Right Wing Moving in on Sesame Street |
Current rating: 0 |
by Victor Pickard
Email: vpickard (nospam) uiuc.edu (unverified!) |
04 Oct 2005
Modified: 09:41:15 AM |
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Right-wing ideologues are quietly taking over our public media. |
Right Wing Moving in on Sesame Street
From the Public i, published by the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center. Oct. 2005.
Just when we thought Big Bird was safe, trouble has returned to Sesame Street. In fact, trouble never left. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the agency that oversees PBS and NPR, is the latest in a long line of institutions to suffer hostile takeovers by right-wing ideologues. Though Republicans’ attempt to de-fund the CPB in June backfired after setting off a public firestorm, the assault from within has run unabated, led by right-wing apparatchik and CPB chair, Kenneth Tomlinson.
During his tenure as the head of CPB, Tomlinson has parlayed propaganda skills learned while directing Voice of America into an ideological crusade to steer PBS and NPR rightward. Though the CPB is mandated by the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act to serve as a buffer between politics and public broadcasting, Tomlinson has used his position to quietly advance a right-wing agenda via stealth tactics including: secretly hiring a conservative consultant to monitor programs for “liberal bias,” attempting to hire a political operative as a fake ombudsman, and conducting secret polls in search of a nonexistent public disquietude towards PBS. All of these machinations were engineered to prove that public broadcasting was fundamentally liberal and in need of “balance.”
Under Tomlinson’s directive, this balance took the form of programming conservative shows like Paul Gigot’s The Journal Editorial Report and Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered (no longer airing on PBS), while cutting Now with Bill Moyers (now hosted by David Brancaccio) in half to 30 minutes. In addition to inserting conservative content, Tomlinson endeavored to stack the CPB board with like-minded ideologues, most notably with the shady selection process that resulted in Patricia Harrison’s appointment as CPB president. Harrison, a former Republican National Committee co-chair, had zero experience with broadcasting media and was selected after a mere two-month search process. The appointment drew swift condemnation from many Democrats and prompted an Inspector General investigation whose findings are expected in late October.
A new outrage occurred on Sept. 26 when Tomlinson helped install an ideological clone, Cheryl Halpern, as the new CPB Chair. Mother Jones magazine ranked Halpern and her husband among the top 100 hard-money donors to Republican candidates during the 2004 election. Halpern has demonstrated contempt for PBS similar to Tomlinson’s. During a Senate hearing she suggested that biased reporters should be penalized, despite the fact that CPB rules forbid such direct interference with programming decisions. Halpern even implied that editorializing journalists – in her view, investigative journalists like Bill Moyers – should be physically removed from the newsroom.
Another Republican operative, Gay Hart Gaines, a charter member and a chairman of Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC and Heritage Foundation member, was simultaneously appointed to the position of vice chair. Gaines is cut from the same cloth as Tomlinson and Halpern. According to David Corn of The Nation, she and her husband have donated at least half a million dollars to Republican projects since 1998. With these appointments, Republicans with close ties to the Bush administration control every important position within the CPB. Such an arrangement will no doubt further politicize PBS and may have a chilling effect on hard-hitting and diverse journalism. Under this new regime, we may see even less “programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences”–– part of public broadcasting’s original mandate.
It is important to recall that these attacks on public broadcasting are part of a long struggle. Republicans have been trying to starve public media for decades, and have recently used budget shortfalls brought on by Hurricane Katrina as yet another excuse for slashing funds. But the takeover from within the CPB is a new strategy. As Frank Rich of the New York Times noted, “The intent is not to kill off PBS and NPR but to castrate them by quietly annexing their news and public affairs operations to the larger state propaganda machine that the Bush White House has been steadily constructing at taxpayers' expense.”
Fortunately, these ideologically driven attacks have not gone uncontested. A coalition of public interest groups including Free Press has kept up pressure on the CPB by channeling public outrage and calling for democratization. Most recently, the media reform coalition delivered statements demanding an end to CPB cronyism and backroom maneuverings, and more transparency and accountability to the public. Reform proposals have included open meetings, space for public testimony, and an end to commissioning secretive studies on PBS and NPR content without informing all members of the CPB board and the public. Time will soon tell whether these cries from the public have fallen on deaf ears.
Preventing the complete Foxification of PBS by holding CPB’s feet to the fire is an important first step in undoing earlier damage. But until we see significant changes in CPB governance, our Sesame Street friends like Big Bird are still in big trouble, and the public will remain shut out of public media.
Victor Pickard is a doctoral student in the Institution of Communications Research and a former producer for Media Matters, aired every Sunday on WILL 580. This summer he worked on telecommunications policy for Congresswoman Diane Watson (D-CA), who is a leading congressional voice in the fight to save public broadcasting. |
