Targeting Tomlinson

Targeting Tomlinson How the Democrats are trying to purge Bush’s conservative pick from the liberal world of public broadcasting.

For nearly six years, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson has fought his battles mostly on his own. Earlier this month he survived a Democrat-led attempt to oust him from the Broadcasting Board of Governors after a State Department inspector general’s report criticized his conduct as chairman. But the same scurrilous charges upon which the report is based have led Republicans in the Senate to put off his re-confirmation hearing until early next year, at which point he will have to fight them all over again.

Tomlinson, whom President Bush nominated during his first term to head both the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), has been the target of Democrat-led attacks from day one, but he hasn’t gotten much help from his ideological allies on the right. Many conservatives view public broadcasting as a waste of taxpayer money that reaches beyond the scope of a properly limited federal government. By contrast, Tomlinson believes that public broadcasting — especially international broadcasting networks like the Voice of America, which the BBG oversees — plays an important role in fighting terrorism, among other things. And though he enjoys the support of the White House, this lack of natural ideological allies has left him relatively isolated in his fight against Democrats whose chief complaint is that he is politicizing the agencies for which he is responsible.

Talk about cronyism:

"On June 24, 2005, Robert Novak reported that Sen. Joe Biden (D.-Del.) was blocking the confirmation of a non-controversial nominee, Dina Habib Powell, to be assistant secretary of State with key responsibilities for the Middle East. Reason for Biden’s fury: The White House had refused to re-appoint California billionaire Norm Pattiz to a Democratic seat on the BBG. Pattiz had violated an unwritten but long-standing Senate rule that a minority appointee cannot attack a President who appointed him. (Pattiz was a signatory to a 2004 campaign ad in the New York Times denouncing President Bush and urging his defeat.)

Pattiz was a huge Democratic donor ($360,000 in 2000 alone) who was rewarded with an overnight stay at the Clinton White House and an appointment to the BBG. In 1992, Novak reported, Pattiz’s Westwood radio conglomerate was fined $75,000 for offering to illegally reimburse employees who contributed to the short-lived 1988 presidential campaign of … Joe Biden. Of the two House Democrats who demanded the IG investigation of Tomlinson, one, Tom Lantos (D.-Calif.) is a former Biden staffer and the other, Berman, is a political intimate of Pattiz"

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