Moyers Fights Back

by JOHN NICHOLS

[from the June 6, 2005 issue]

The Bush Administration allies who have taken over the Corporation for Public Broadcasting may have thought they could turn public television into another of their echo chambers without a fight. But they didn't count on Bill Moyers.

Moyers, who secured thirty Emmys during three decades on PBS, stormed out of retirement May 15 to condemn manipulations of the network's content and programming engineered by Kenneth Tomlinson, the Republican chair of the CPB board of directors, and to call for a renewed commitment to principled journalism at PBS and throughout American media. "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," Moyers told more than 2,000 activists, academics and journalists gathered in St. Louis for the National Conference for Media Reform. Moyers, who stepped down in December as the host of the highly regarded PBS program NOW With Bill Moyers, detailed Tomlinson's partisan meddling, from the hiring of Bush aides and allies to fill key positions at the CPB to his allocation of $5 million in tax money to develop a weekly broadcast featuring the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. But his main focus was the revelation that Tomlinson spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor to monitor NOW and report on its supposed political bias. "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," joked Moyers. "Hell, you could have called me--collect--and I would have told you what was on the broadcast that night." (The full text of Moyers's speech is at www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-34.htm.)