The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is intended to be non-partisan--its purpose, in fact, is to shield PBS from political meddling. In other words, it was to be a buffer between politicians and the broadcasters that would shield them from political interference.
The inspector general of the Corporate for Public Broadcasting has now issued a report suggesting that Kenneth Tomlinson, former CPB Chairperson, violated both federal law and ethical guidelines by improperly using his position to interfere with PBS programming in an effort to turn it to the right. One part of that effort was getting rid of Bill Moyers and cutting his highly regarded news documentary program to half the time. Tomlinson funded a Wall Street Journal program to fill the freed-up half hour at an unusally high price tag of $4.1 million for the first season. He also hired a "consultant" to investigate Bill Moyers' programming to determine how many of his guests were liberal or conservative. Before the public release of the report and in connection with a preliminary presentation to the CPB board, Tomlinson resigned. See the report in Media Matters here and the Washington Post here.
Even though the inspector general report also indicated that Tomlinson recruited Patricia Harrison, the current President of CPB, on a partisan basis, the board of CPB said it still supports her. Harrison is a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee. And, according to the Post story,
"Despite his departure, the CPB remains firmly controlled by conservatives. Tomlinson's successor as chairman, Cheryl F. Halpern, is a longtime contributor to Republicans, including President Bush and Sen. Trent Lott (Miss.). Its vice chairman, Gay Hart Gaines, another Republican contributor, was a founder and former chairman of GOPAC, a powerful GOP fundraising group. Tomlinson, a former editor of Reader's Digest, remains chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a federal agency unrelated to CPB that oversees the government's international broadcasting services."
The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial Nov. 17 that was sharply critical of the CPB inspector general's report. See PBS and Us, Wall St. J., Nov. 17, 2005, at A16. The Journal claims that Tomlinson was merely carrying out the mandate of CPB to ensure there was balanced programming. The Journal editorial implies that Tomlinson's view of a need of an injection of strong Republican viewpoints was necessary, calling Moyers' program at the top of the public-affairs programming a "satrapy."
What isn't said in all this is just how skewed towards the right so much of the media is--even PBS. On any Jim Lehrer News Hour program, guests from the right will tend to outnumber guests from the left. Moyers' program was liberal in tone, but it was well-respected for its thoroughly investigated programs and its open and fair discussion of ideas. Unlike the Journal's program laden with unreflective free market ideology, the Moyers' program engaged in open inquiry representing the best of what journalism should strive to be.
Remember that this episode takes place against a finding in late September by the Government Accountability Office, a non-partisan arm of Congress, that the Bush administration had illegally used goverment funds to support covert propaganda by hiring conservative pundits to promote its policies. We also saw the disturbing pattern of government video news releases that have been provided to stations and broadcast as though they were independently produced without attribution to the government. Propaganda in that fashion is what we associate with dictatorships and oligarchies like the USSR and China. It has no place in a democracy.
The disturbing flip side of the propaganda coin is the increasing secrecy of this regime and related politicization of bureaucratic decisionmaking, from the FDA to the EPA, from FEMA to the FCC. The December 1, 2005 issue of the New York Review of Books has an interesting article by Michael Massing entitled "The End of News?". Massing notes some disturbing trends from a recent report on government secrecy by OpenTheGovernment.org, including an increase of 81 percent in the number of documents that are classified now compared with before 9/11, and a record 64 percent of federal advisory committee meetings in 2004 were closed to the public. We all know that the Pentagon has banned television from photographing the return of bodies from Iraq. Massing reports that even William Safire, a conservative pundit, has suggested "that 'the fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before." Id. at 23.
The pattern of behind-closed-door decisionmaking, without media attention and broad dispersal of information, has disastrous results for the public. Take the example of the morning-after birth control pill, as described in the New York Times here and in the Chicago Tribute here. A GAO report released November 14 indicates that the FDA rejection of the pill was problematic. Top political appointees made the final decision, which is very rare. In an unprecedented approach, the officials disregarded the recommendation of the independent advisory committee and the agency's own scientific review staff. The rationale proffered contradicted past agency practice. And the officials decided before the lower-level committees had even finished their review.
This heightened government secrecy and control of perspectives is aided by the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, which--together with the increasing consolidation of media outlets in the hands of a few very wealthy corporations--has made possible a "disciplined and well-organized news and opinion campaign directed by conservatives and the Christian right." Id. Distorted perspectives can be spread easily through radios talk shows and websites, especially when targeted at audiences who are unlikely to read newspapers or keep themselves informed by reading widely across various media outlets. The final blow is journalists who become insiders through close ties to particular staffers or officials, leading to reporting of White House perspectives with uncritical coverage. Years after its reporting helped the White House make the case for its planned invasion of Iraq based on Saddam's (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction, the New York Times had to apologize for its inadquately sourced and researched stories.
The Valerie Plame outing is the perfect storm of hubris of the powerful, government secrecy, embedded reporting, disciplined conservative opinion creation, and smear campaigns reverberating through the talk shows of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, and others. While Tomlinson's departure clears the air somewhat at CPB and the GAO reports at least brought the Bush use of propaganda into the open and called attention to the politicized decision-making at the FDA, the ongoing saga of Judith Miller and the Joe Wilson smear campaign continues to get foggier. We now have significant evidence that indicates Bush's chief of staff Karl Rove, vice president Dick Cheney and Cheney's now-indicted former chief of staff Scooter Libby were engaged in multiple discussions with multiple reporters about Wilson's wife Valerie Plame and her connection with the CIA.
Adding to the intrigue, we now learn that Bob Woodward at the Washington Post had talked with some senior White House official even before Libby spoke with Miller about Pflame. Woodward kept his conversation secret for seventeen months, even appearing on media shows and disparaging Fitzgerald's investigation. See this New York Times story. He apparently revealed his knowledge now only because of the need to testify. The Los Angeles Times offers a scathing indictment of Woodward, here, as a journalist who was seduced by his access to the powerful. Not only did Woodward keep secret the fact that he had been approached by a senior White House official about Plame while he trashed the investigation into the Plame affair on national media, but he also failed to inform his reading public that his interviews on his latest book had been conducted in the manner of spineless journalism in dictatorships--he had submitted his questions to Dick Cheney ahead of time for approval. Id. The LA Times has this to say about this access-needy style of journalism.
"It's a journalistic strategy style dependent on the cultivation of access to well-placed officials greased by promises of "confidentiality." It's a way of doing journalism that still serves its practitioners' career interests, but less and less often their readers or viewers because it's a game the powerful and well-connected have learned to play to their own advantage. Whatever its self-righteous pretensions, it's a style of journalism whose signature sound is less the blowing of whistles than it is the spinning of tops."
Until journalists start to do their job again, we can expect to have more "spin" and less whistle blowing.
To help prevent spin, the use of anonymous sources should be more restricted, so that government officials cannot so easily co-opt the press. How about a rule that anonymous sources are fine when they are speaking against interest--in other words, a government official who is blowing the whistle on a government activity can be offered confidentiality because that official could not speak without confidentiality and the information that official offers is important to the American people's understanding of their government. The corollary would provide that a government official who is merely offering selected gossip that the official wants to have disseminated should not be offered confidentiality. There's simply no justification. Confidentiality in that case only furthers government misleading of the public about its activities.
Two other rules are necessary to deal with Judith Miller and Bob Woodward's mistakes. No journalist should be able to mis-identify a confidential source (Miller's agreement to the misleading description "Hill staffer" for Libby) and no journalist should be permitted to maintain exclusive information about sources--there should be a memo to the file, accessible by appropriate superiors in editorial offices, that outlines all relevant information about the source, the source's control of interview format, and the information actually provided in the interview.
With a government like this one, that sets its policy based on ideology without the benefit of transparency and the informed discussion that open, public meetings can engender, we cannot afford a guillible press that merely feeds us the line it was fed. It is time for the press corps to wake up and make a dash for the nearest exit. Dis-embed and get to work.