Posted on 11/18/2005 9:26:03 AM PST by inpajamas
SUMMARY: If public broadcasting needed fixing, we'd hear about it on NPR and PBS, wouldn't we?
They got him! The dirty, no-good, rotten Republican miscreant Kenneth Tomlinson, until recently the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting - they nailed his sorry conservative hind end to the floor! It's a wonder it took so long.
A six-month investigation into this right-wing Clinton appointee's mismanagement of the holy temple of enlightened government culminated this past week with an inspector general's report alleging Tomlinson ignored public broadcasting rules and ethics code, which is sort of bad. But his transgressions were believed to be motivated by a desire to include a wee bit of conservative thought in the relentless stream of leftist dogma that flows out over the taxpayer-subsidized airwaves, and that, our Friends of PBS, makes his misdeeds totally awful. Where's an NPR pledge-week tote bag full of llama manure when you need one? Tomlinson deserves a good pounding. Where did this guy get off anyway? Bring political balance to public broadcasting? Get serious. People who think conservatives have something worth hearing can go listen to A.M. radio talk shows.
Among the specific wrongs of which Tomlinson stands accused is that he consulted with officials at the White House regarding hiring of people to dole out the $400 million of your tax dollars CPB funnels to public TV and radio stations; that he violated a fascinating CPB rule that says people running the system may not actually have anything to say about what kind of propaganda gets broadcast using public funds; and, shockingly, that he lobbied for and scraped up money to fund a new PBS public affairs program featuring members of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
Anyone who thinks editorial board meetings are the stuff of good television obviously has the right stuff to run the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But those tax-cut-worshiping, Hillary-Clinton-hating, Bush-boosting WSJ pundits? They're zealots. No place for them in public broadcasting. Couldn't he find some more thoughtful, moderate, mainstream contributors to the public dialogue like Bill Moyers? No one's going to object to that kind of balance on public television and radio.
Well, Tomlinson is toast. He's quit his job, everyone close to him is clouded in suspicion, and if the inspector general's report can generate enough trouble for him, the next would-be reformer will think twice before attempting to mess with a broadcasting system whose listeners and viewers prefer to think for themselves - at least about the things the folks on “All Things Considered” say they should think about.
There never was any real danger that Tomlinson was going to fundamentally change the nature of public broadcasting in America. No one could. The entrenched system serves a fervent audience not particularly interested in conservative thought while providing large, multinational corporations a conduit for warm-and-fuzzy image-buffing ads aimed at mollifying their harshest critics. (Nothing like sponsoring a program about the evils of clubbing baby seals to make an oil company look good.) The people who watch and listen like it just the way it is.
No, the real danger to public broadcasting is that any controversy is likely to lead to annoying questions about why, in the great Information Age, with a huge spectrum of television, radio, print and online media, the federal government taxes citizens to provide a little more content to a narrow audience, conservative or liberal. And why is a broadcasting system that generates huge revenues through the solicitation of “sponsorships” that seem a whole lot like advertising still regarded as non-commercial and worthy of public subsidy?
Well, with that said and Tomlinson gone, there goes any hope you had of watching the Missoulian editorial board on PBS. Public Broadcasting will now return to its regularly scheduled programming, free of annoying static.
PBS and NPR, how much of our deficit can be paid off if we just cancel funding for these two organizations?
About 1%
Missoula is a nice little college commie town we in Montana would all love to just nuke off the face of the earth.
"If PBS doesn't do it, who will?"
how about:
FreeRepublic.com
The Internet
Fox News Channel
C-SPAN
C-SPAN2
C-SPAN3
History Channel
A&E
National Geographic Channel
Discovery Channel
The Learning Channel
House&Garden TV
CNN
CNN Headline News
CNBC
MSNBC
CNNfn
Disney Channel
Bravo
Spike
Wings
HBO
Showtime
Starz
IFC
AMC
Turner Classic Movies
Nickelodeon
USA Network
Cartoon Channel
Comedy Central
Sci-Fi Channel
Lifetime
ABC Family
TechTV
ESPN
ESPN2
Fox SportsNet
the lamestream See-B.S., ABS, NBS
crummy local stations
even crap like MTV and VH1
and many more . . . .
Actually, about 1/10th of 1%.
$400M as compared to $400B.
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