Bush Frontal Attack On NPR Fails,
But New Approach Is More Stealthy

By William Finucane

Well then, now that the U.S. House of Representatives has pulled back its guns and allowed the full $400,000,000 in federal funding to go to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the station supporters out in the nation can sit back, kick off their shoes and relax. The public broadcast crisis is over.

Not really.

Most of the people who support the public broadcasting stations read more deeply than the headlines. That is why they like the public broadcasting network, it offers much more.

Here, the "much more" is the real story.

Republicans – no, no, not traditional Republicans but rather Bushwhackers who are way more conservative than most of the traditional GOP rank and file – have not conceded the race for the public airwaves. Instead of trying to choke off the public television and radio airwaves, which stirs a firestorm of opposition - as the Bushwhackers expected and recently tested for strength and durability - they have simply moved to Plan B, they will try to co-opt public broadcasting.

Any doubt of this policy was erased over the past few weeks. President George W. Bush has appointed Kenneth Tomlinson as chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which sends public money to the Public Broadcasting System (television) and National Public Radio. Tomlinson’s caveat is to straighten up this wild liberal broadcasting.

One might observe that Tomlinson’s government agency gives the stations only 25 percent of their operational funding, so he could not possibly influence the station managers all that much. But oh yes he can.

Big programs are handled at the national level. And Tomlinson holds a substantial portion of those purse strings. Even if stations in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia and other large cities across the nation could go out and produce their own programs, there would still be small stations everywhere that need the national programming service to stay afloat.

Yet some GOP U.S. House members moved to cut $100,000,000 from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They must have missed the memo. It said the executive branch is not going to get in a nasty money fight with all these liberal broadcasters and their supporters; the executive branch is going to come at them from above, replace their leaders with Bush followers and, eventually, turn public broadcasting into what the radical GOP Bushwhackers think it should be – a way to spread propaganda.

Many leaders in countries around the world do this; most are called dictators.

Tomlinson already kicked out the chairman and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, replacing that person with Patricia Harrison. Remember her? Harrison is the former co-chair of the Republican National Committee.

All possible objectivity has now been shown the door.

Back in 1994 Newt Gingrich tried to strip funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He felt the Republican viewpoint was getting short shrift, but his attempt failed. This assault is much more dangerous.

This time the goal is to remove objective reporting from public broadcasting. One may hate what is revealed on the public news shows, but there is nobody telling the reporters what they must say or do. So all the listeners know that what they are getting is the best of traditional reporting; i.e., news and information as the reporters found it.

Like it or leave it, all listeners and viewers know that what they get is not designed to burnish anyone’s image or hide a scandal or hear some other country’s news from a stilted viewpoint.

A good deal of the strength behind this sort of broadcasting has been due to the objective role that the chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its president and chief operating executive have played. With Tomlinson and Harrison at the helm, the objectivity map has been cast overboard.

Public broadcasting only came into full national prominence in the mid-1960s. In terms of history, it has not been there long. But it has had a profound effect because of a simple, ironic fact: Commercial broadcasting has, over the past 55 years, increasingly prostrated itself to the interests of advertisers and the government. Long gone are the days of Edward R. Murrow, when true journalism was practiced on the airwaves.

George W. Bush and his followers want to push this commercial network subservience into the only broadcasting bastion that has remained free of advertising, and even overt government influence. NPR has always survived because of a balance of coverage, not because it is biased, although the right-wing has long tried to portray NPR as lopsided in its coverage, primarily because NPR has not colored the news with a right-wing viewpoint. Now, of course, there is little if any balance in the political system; the new, radical GOP is in ascendancy, it controls both Houses of Congress and has captured the executive branch through the controversial presidency of Mr. Bush.

It is nonetheless worth recalling that when the Democrats were in full power, there was never a threat to public broadcasting. The Democrats weren’t afraid of honest reporting.

The radical GOP of Mr. Bush and his Bushwhackers are afraid. They want it their own way, and quickly, because otherwise truth that is not usually available in the major media may well be disseminated through public broadcasting.

The terrible irony of this is that the print press, which has protection from government censure through the Constitution, has become so large and corporate that it is now generally GOP owned and oriented toward conservative values, so it is not considered much of a threat to Mr. Bush and his radical, ideological policies. In the same vein, commercial broadcasting outlets must be licensed by the government, and therefore are very timid when facing government lies, and anyone who is paying attention would have to admit, regardless of individual beliefs, that the Bush Administration has mastered the public lie.

Some of the changes that the new Public Broadcasting chief Tomlinson has made are breathtaking. Take the example of Tomlinson trying to train public broadcasting reporters and editors in the mechanics of seeking out all sides of given issues; he held a seminar. His chief professor was Brit Hume.

Hume once was a respected journalist.

Once.

Now he is an unabashed right-wing hack.

Everything that a public broadcaster is supposed to professionally strive for in reporting the news is diametrically opposed to what Hume has become professionally. Bringing him forward to lecture and direct a group of largely underpaid, dedicated professionals and telling them to follow his lead is a profound insult.

Worse, it is exactly the kind of maneuver that can drive the solid, dedicated journalists now in the ranks of the NPR staff out of the business of public radio, leaving a vacuum that will naturally suck hacks and the professionally complacent into the public broadcasting realm.

Private news corporations have vast recourses. They have money galore.They can pay their people huge sums. They own and operate radio, television, cable and newspapers. One would think this would give them freedom to cover the news at least objectively, but it does not. Wall Street and financing interests compound a system run by executives that are usually Republican and in all events are conservative regarding the stockholder reports that keep them in office.

Unlike 30 years ago, there is no uncountable number of independent newspaper owners around the nation. Independent publishers have been and are being bought out at more than an alarming rate, and their publications usually become part of larger and larger conglomerates. Such organizations must normally be funded through stock offerings coupled with major bank financing, which means that fewer and fewer press lords of today are free of obligations to Wall Street and the banking industry.

And of course this is not much of a problem or an issue for today’s corporate press barons because they are most often Republicans themselves, so the consolidation of power and political values often match those of Wall Street and the bankers with whom they work. This same formula applies even more emphatically to broadcast networks, since they have no Constitutional protection and have always been regulated by the government, which over the years has, perhaps naturally, made them more and more conservative and obsequious.

It’s not, therefore, surprising that radio and television stations, and the networks behind them, have an abundance of conservative talk shows and so-called news commentary. The problem is that at this critical point in American history, dialogue on the airwaves, with the possible exception of Air America, is virtually all one-sided.

But no one is suggesting that the conservative viewpoints should be pushed off the airwaves. Americans have traditionally been an unusually open-minded populace, yet what has happened in recent years is that conservative viewpoints have dominated public discourse to such a degree that some people have come to believe that anything that contradicts them is unpatriotic. Even worse, this developing atmosphere has made it possible for the ultra-conservative Bush Administration to believe that most people are ready to agree that NPR’s balanced newsgathering is in fact liberal polemics, and therefore if they move to curtail it no one will object.

Well, they tested the water and it was hot!

A great many Americans do not want any changes in the professional approach of NPR. These Americans understand that what they learn on NPR is simply balanced, but they also understand that too many conservatives today feel that news and information that is not slanted in a reactionary fashion is therefore left leaning. These so-called conservatives apparently can no longer discern the middle, which after all made America great in the first place.

American citizens from coast to coast have been and are paying cash from their own pockets to keep the public broadcast system alive. Those who do so in order to support such independent broadcast are saying – loud and clear – that this is exactly what they want. There is no need for a market survey and a deep study of people’s buying habits; all of the information is right there in the form of eloquent cash.

But Mr. Bush and his followers aren’t satisfied. They want to undercut and if possible derail NPR news. By installing ideologues as the top people in the organization – Tomlison and Harrison – he thinks he can do it. He even thinks he can overcome the enormous private giving that supports NPR by maneuvering the federal 25 percent of the budget pie. Maybe he can. Time will tell.

Conservatives may be happy – for a while.

But if they are successful they may find themselves faced with the old adage: Be careful what you wish for! In the end, they may see that the deconstruction of the public service broadcasting system will not serve to spread conservatism, but will rather ultimately serve to provide a podium for whatever dictum the current president wants preached.

What Mr. Bush is trying to do, where possible, is take away the fourth estate’s right – no, its duty – to hold a mirror up to the world and report whatever there is to report, even if it is against the president’s and the government’s wishes or desires.

Holding up that mirror without distortion is the most important duty facing anyone practicing journalism.

Bush and his followers currently own the executive and legislative branches, and it seems possible that they will soon capture the judiciary when the chief justice either resigns for ill health or passes away in office. Those are the three estates of government. The fourth – the press – is clearly the next target since the ideologues and religious absolutists that comprise the Bush Administration already believe they have or soon will have the other estates in their control, which leaves the final curtailment of the press as the only task left before gaining total control.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is falling now, and will collapse into the hands of the ultra-conservatives unless mainstream Americans, liberals or not, act fast to save it.