MoveOn Org Mailing about CPB's Kenneth Tomlinson

"Your petition signatures and phone calls helped restore $100 million of funding
for NPR, PBS and local public stations. But public broadcasting is still under attack.
On the same day the House restored funding, Kenneth Tomlinson, the Republican chair
of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), rammed through his choice for CPB's
new president: a former Republican National Committee co-chair.¹

Tomlinson is on a crusade to inject his politics into public broadcasting. He
insisted on a new PBS show devoted to the right-wing Wall
Street Journal editorial board. And he's under investigation for secretly
spending our tax dollars on a "liberal bias" witch hunt to intimidate journalists
at NPR and PBS.² Many people, including 68 members of Congress, are calling on
Tomlinson to resign for attempting a partisan takeover of public broadcasting.³

Do you think we should fight Tomlinson's effort
to push partisan politics into public broadcasting? We rely on your input
before we act. Please let us know with this quick survey on Tomlinson and other issues:

http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/survey/?id=5763-6146424-6NOaCKn_MEpW2SXUFQCqqw

Your response will help set a course of action to protect public broadcasting.
We also want to know what you think about other issues MoveOn.org and our sister
organization, MoveOn PAC, work on. Please take this quick survey today.

If we decide to take on Tomlinson, we could do things like asking our local public
stations not to air Tomlinson's partisan programming and writing letters of support
to CPB board members and public broadcasting executives who are standing up to Tomlinson's
attempted takeover.

Despite his complaints of bias, Tomlinson's own polling shows Americans find public
broadcasting more balanced and trustworthy than any of the commercial news networks.⁴ Yet he hired a Bush White House official to write guidelines for "balance"
on public broadcasting. Now he's hiring a new CPB president, Patricia Harrison, who
helped elect George W. Bush in 2000. Since then, Harrison has been working for Bush,
developing PR to convince the world to support the war in Iraq.⁵ Harrison has
no experience in public broadcasting, just propaganda.

A Republican operative is the wrong choice to run a nonpartisan organization,
and it's a real threat to the editorial independence of NPR, PBS and local stations.
Harrison got the job because of Tomlinson, despite public and Congressional calls
for a CPB president free of partisan ties.

We still need to demand the Senate restore full funding to NPR and PBS, but in
the meantime, should we focus on Tomlinson's effort to remake public broadcasting
into a partisan mouthpiece? Tell us what you think by clicking here:

http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/survey/?id=5763-6146424-6NOaCKn_MEpW2SXUFQCqqw

Thank you for all you do,

–Noah, Micayla, Marika, Carrie and the MoveOn.org Team

  Friday, July 8th, 2005

Sources:

1. "Public Broadcast Agency Picks GOP Appointee Over Protests," Washington Post, June 24, 2005

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=765



2. "Channeling the right," Salon,
June 23, 2005

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=767



3. "Researcher's Appraisals of Commentators Are Released," New York Times, July 1, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/politics/01broadcast.html



"Democrats rap PBS chief," Boston Herald,
July 2, 2005

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=773



4. "CPB's 'Secrets and Lies': Why the CPB Board Hid its Polls Revealing Broad
Public Support for PBS and NPR," Center for Digital Democracy, April 27, 2005

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=746



5. "CPB's Propagandist-in-Chief Ken Tomlinson and his Choice for its next President,"
Center for Digital Democracy, May 19, 2005

http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/0519-09.htm