home > "A Democracy can die of too many lies"

Television journalist Bill Moyers blasts flag-wearing phonies, reporters who
parrot the government line, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's
"dangerous" campaign to silence dissenting voices.

Editor's note: This is an address given by Bill Moyers at the National
Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis, Mo., on Sunday.

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By Bill Moyers

May 17, 2005 | 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
or produce for 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."

For all our flaws, Pat argues that the public media 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 it 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 Œlies within the internet with its two billion
or more web sites providing a wealth of information drawn from almost
unlimited resources that span the globeŠIf 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 forty 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 two thousand 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 okay 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
post-war 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 Œliberation' 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 thirty
years ago or the Iran Contra conspiracy twenty years ago or Bill Clinton's
fund raising scandals ten 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," he
said, "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 Œexperts' 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 Los Angeles 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, 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 ideasŠ I'm tired of
political shows featuring two guests shouting over each other and offering
the same argumentsŠ 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, back room 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
voicesŠ 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 worldview 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 of 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 getting it right, not right-wing --
telling stories that partisans in power didn't want told.

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) Senator Trent
Lott came out squealing like a stuck pig when after the mid-term 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 Public Affairs Center for Television that Nixon had
tried to kill -- NPACT -- put PBS on the map by rebroadcasting in prime time
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 naïve, 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 forŠ you
guessed itŠ 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 Œprotective
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 five million dollars, 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 dollars.

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 what was on the broadcast
that night.

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
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 10th op-ed piece, in Reverend Moon's conservative "Washington
Times", Mr. Tomlinson maintained he had not released the findings because
public broadcasting is such a delicate institution 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."

I repeat: I would like to have given Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt.
But this is the man 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 lists 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 black list 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 The 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 Š my other
daughter, near the Brooklyn Bridge Š my son in high school. But my Charlie
took off like a lightening bolt to be with his men from the Special
Operations Command. ŒBring my gear to the plaza,' he told his aide
immediately after the first plane struck the North TowerŠHe 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 continued, chain-of-command rules extend to every captain
of every firehouse 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 leadershipŠ Watch everyone pass the blame again in this
recent torture case [Abu Ghraib] of Iraqi prisonsŠ"

She told me that she and her husband had watched my series on "Joseph
Campbell and the Power of Myth" together and that now she was a faithful fan
of NOW. She wrote: "We need more programs like yours to wake America upŠ.
Such programs must continue amidst the sea of false images and name calling
that divide America nowŠSuch 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 interests 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."