Who are the People in your Neighborhood?
Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. If you keep track of where your tax dollars go, you may know that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by act of Congress, is charged with doling out various federal monies to non-commercial broadcasters, including PBS and the distributor of this program, NPR. Just how much does the CPB kick in every year? Nearly 400 million dollars in 2005 - the third largest source of funds after private businesses and listeners like you. But, like any government go-between, especially one whose board is appointed by the president, the Corporation is vulnerable to accusations of political bias and persuasion - accusations that have surfaced recently over staff shakeups. Long depicted as a tool of the liberal elite, the CPB is now - if you believe Jeff Chester - in the midst of a conservative coup. Chester is executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington. Jeff, welcome back to OTM.
JEFF CHESTER: Thank you, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: The 1992 bill that re-authorized the CPB contained a clause mandating balance and objectivity on public broadcasting. Now, you say that that language is being used by the current CPB board, in effect to neuter content. How?
JEFF CHESTER: Up until now, this issue of objectivity, of balance, has been interpreted that overall in a programming schedule throughout the year, there'll be different points of view. But the CPB board, led by former Voice of America chief and Reader's Digest executive Ken Tomlinson is really insisting, now, that almost every program on PBS have that kind of balance - in other words, undermine the ability of PBS to have very strong public affairs programming, investigative programming and independent programming.
BOB GARFIELD: Is the political right hallucinating about this? Isn't there, in fact, some sort of ongoing thread of left of center sensibilities on public broadcasting?
JEFF CHESTER: A lot of the problem simply relates to PBS doing the job it's supposed to do on a Frontline, for example, or on a Now with Bill Moyers, and then incurring the wrath of those who control the purse strings. So, look, the critics of public broadcasting view a lot of the journalism that's on the air as simply biased. What they don't appreciate is that many of those programs are done in a serious journalistic fashion. These folks simply don't want to hear the bad news.
BOB GARFIELD: Let's get back to the current situation which surrounds a woman named Kathleen Cox. Tell me her story.
JEFF CHESTER: Well, Kathleen Cox was a dedicated bureaucrat at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In a way, she rose through the ranks. She was groomed for the job of president, spending four years under the previous president, and assumed the presidency about nine months ago, but was mysteriously, in a way, let go just a few days ago. Anyone at CPB in senior ranks who doesn't want to endorse the board's obsession with ensuring quote/unquote "objectivity and balance" is simply out the door. And the minute that they brought in a new chief operating officer, Ken Ferree, Cox was, in essence, let go.
BOB GARFIELD: Ken Ferree became fairly prominent as the spokesman for Michael Powell at the FCC. Can we assume that Ken Ferree is a, a representative of the political right?
JEFF CHESTER: Ferree himself may not be ideological, but what he showed at the FCC is he is willing to do anything to please his superiors. If that means coming up with a research agenda which shows, surprisingly, that yes, we have a tremendous competition in media today, if it means not having public hearings about the future of public broadcasting, as he failed to have public hearings at the FCC on ownership, Ferree will deliver to the CPB board whatever it takes to accomplish their agenda, and that's a dangerous situation.
BOB GARFIELD: One of the later developments is the appointment of a couple of ombudsmen to monitor the, the content of public broadcasting. Is this part of the same deal?
JEFF CHESTER: Yeah, the CPB board is ratcheting up the pressure on public broadcasting, appointing these two ombudspersons who have this far-ranging mandate to investigate any programming on radio or television, even those programs not federally funded. So what CPB is saying is, you know, we're watching you, PBS and NPR, and if we don't like the programming you air, well, we're going to have an investigation.
BOB GARFIELD: Jeff, just one point of disclosure here. Your Center for Digital Democracy is funded in part by the Schumann Foundation, the president of which is--?
JEFF CHESTER: Bill Moyers.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I just want to observe that if Dan Rather is the poster child for liberal bias in the commercial media, then I, I guess Bill Moyers plays the same role in public broadcasting.
JEFF CHESTER: The Schumann Foundation has funded my organization for a number of years to work on issues not related to public broadcasting, but I personally have been involved with public broadcasting issues for more than 20 years, and I have grown alarmed about this current attack, which is why we are focusing on it.
BOB GARFIELD: All right, Jeff. Well, thank you very much.
JEFF CHESTER: Thank you, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: Jeff Chester is executive director for the Center for Digital Democracy. Karen Everhart is senior editor and writer for Current, the newspaper about public broadcasting. Karen, welcome to OTM.
KAREN EVERHART: Thank you for having me.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, we've just heard from Jeff Chester, who spoke of an overt political agenda to strangle the powerful content of public broadcasting from the top. Do you see things differently?
KAREN EVERHART: Well, I do somewhat. I just came back from the PBS convention in Las Vegas, where I, I was able to talk to a CPB board member who is a minority board member. She's an independent. She's not part of the Republican majority. And she talked to me about the decision to not retain Ms. Cox on her contract, and she said it wasn't driven by any particular issue or any of the things that have come up. It was really more that the board was looking for someone who could provide more dynamic leadership.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, but you did, you know, use the phrase "Republican-controlled," and you covered CPB all through the Clinton years.
KAREN EVERHART: Right.
BOB GARFIELD: How would you say the current board stacks up against the board of, say, 10 years ago? I mean is it fair to say that whoever is in the White House is going to stack the deck with political patrons?
KAREN EVERHART: Yes, it is fair to say that. I mean President Clinton did that, and President Bush is doing it. The president can only appoint five members of his own political party to the CPB board, so the remaining four members have to be either Democrats or Independents. Right now, there are five Republicans on the board, two Democrats, and one Independent - and one vacancy. So, this is as Republican as the board can get.
BOB GARFIELD: It might be tempting to dismiss Jeff Chester and others as alarmists, but this is the Bush administration we're talking about, and it certainly hasn't been shy about imposing its political will on other parts of the bureaucracy, including recently the tempest over the animated bunny rabbit Buster, whose post card from a lesbian household in Vermont just caused a, a firestorm of controversy. Can we make a legitimate connection between what's going on at the CPB board level right now and the Department of Education's punitive actions with respect to Buster?
KAREN EVERHART: I can't make that connection for you. The Department of Education provides money directly to PBS through the Ready to Learn program, and so CPB isn't really a player in that whole relationship, in how that whole controversy spun out. You know, I have a much less alarmist view about this, because I've seen the pressure from the left and the right on public broadcasting, and it - over time, it does seem to balance itself out, in my view. The last time that they had a really dynamic leader at CPB was in the early 1990s. His name was Richard Carlson, and people were really afraid, because he was picked by a Republican board, and he was a Republican himself who had contributed to the first President Bush's political campaigns, that he himself was going to wield some muscle over public broadcasting programs and try to influence it. But he didn't. He stepped back from that.
BOB GARFIELD: So Richard Carlson left behind twin legacies. One is his son, Tucker, whose show, Unfiltered, on PBS is explicitly there as an ideological balance. But there's also a sort of poison pill, a re-assertion of the mandate for objectivity, which Carlson in his day didn't make much of, but which the current leadership seems to be following to a T. Tell me about the objectivity mandate.
KAREN EVERHART: In this instance, I guess it started around November 2002. There was an outcry over a commentary that Bill Moyers delivered on his weekly PBS program, Now with Bill Moyers. And the CPB board members really didn't like him editorializing on the air. What he did was he talked about the Republican electoral gains in the 2002 mid-term elections in a very, very provocative way. So, since that time, they have done a number of things to try to put forward the notion that stations have to be more assertive of assuring balance and objectivity in their programs. They commission new programs, from Tucker Carlson, as you mentioned, and also the Wall Street Journal, their editorial board; and at this point, they just - right before Kathleen Cox left, they hired two ombudsmen to take a look at programs that are controversial or that people raise questions about.
BOB GARFIELD: It seems to me that the origins of public broadcasting go back to Newton Minnow's famous description of commercial television in the early '60s as being a vast wasteland. And public broadcasting was supposed to be the antidote to the sort of cynicism and commercialization and lowest common denominator aspects of network TV. Was it ever intended to be the Gettysburg of the culture wars between the red states and the blue?
KAREN EVERHART: No, it wasn't. CPB was set up to be a heat shield, to prevent these sort of things from happening, but the way that it's structured, in terms of the political appointments to the CPB board make it very hard to do that, and they are very sensitive to their own political party's interests and the demands about the way the system is performing on its mandate, and the extent to which CPB is able to sort of mitigate those pressures and its own role to sort of protect public broadcasting's editorial integrity as a heat shield - that's really what's at stake here, and it's going to be very interesting to follow over the next few months as these ombudsmen come into play and review programs and make statements about things that are on the air, and as CPB conducts its leadership search.
BOB GARFIELD: Karen, thank you very much.
KAREN EVERHART: Thank you very much for having me.
BOB GARFIELD: Karen Everhart is senior editor and writer for Current, the newspaper on public broadcasting. By the way, On the Media has in the past been a direct recipient of CPB funding. [MUSIC]
copyright 2005 WNYC Radio
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. If you keep track of where your tax dollars go, you may know that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by act of Congress, is charged with doling out various federal monies to non-commercial broadcasters, including PBS and the distributor of this program, NPR. Just how much does the CPB kick in every year? Nearly 400 million dollars in 2005 - the third largest source of funds after private businesses and listeners like you. But, like any government go-between, especially one whose board is appointed by the president, the Corporation is vulnerable to accusations of political bias and persuasion - accusations that have surfaced recently over staff shakeups. Long depicted as a tool of the liberal elite, the CPB is now - if you believe Jeff Chester - in the midst of a conservative coup. Chester is executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington. Jeff, welcome back to OTM.
JEFF CHESTER: Thank you, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: The 1992 bill that re-authorized the CPB contained a clause mandating balance and objectivity on public broadcasting. Now, you say that that language is being used by the current CPB board, in effect to neuter content. How?
JEFF CHESTER: Up until now, this issue of objectivity, of balance, has been interpreted that overall in a programming schedule throughout the year, there'll be different points of view. But the CPB board, led by former Voice of America chief and Reader's Digest executive Ken Tomlinson is really insisting, now, that almost every program on PBS have that kind of balance - in other words, undermine the ability of PBS to have very strong public affairs programming, investigative programming and independent programming.
BOB GARFIELD: Is the political right hallucinating about this? Isn't there, in fact, some sort of ongoing thread of left of center sensibilities on public broadcasting?
JEFF CHESTER: A lot of the problem simply relates to PBS doing the job it's supposed to do on a Frontline, for example, or on a Now with Bill Moyers, and then incurring the wrath of those who control the purse strings. So, look, the critics of public broadcasting view a lot of the journalism that's on the air as simply biased. What they don't appreciate is that many of those programs are done in a serious journalistic fashion. These folks simply don't want to hear the bad news.
BOB GARFIELD: Let's get back to the current situation which surrounds a woman named Kathleen Cox. Tell me her story.
JEFF CHESTER: Well, Kathleen Cox was a dedicated bureaucrat at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In a way, she rose through the ranks. She was groomed for the job of president, spending four years under the previous president, and assumed the presidency about nine months ago, but was mysteriously, in a way, let go just a few days ago. Anyone at CPB in senior ranks who doesn't want to endorse the board's obsession with ensuring quote/unquote "objectivity and balance" is simply out the door. And the minute that they brought in a new chief operating officer, Ken Ferree, Cox was, in essence, let go.
BOB GARFIELD: Ken Ferree became fairly prominent as the spokesman for Michael Powell at the FCC. Can we assume that Ken Ferree is a, a representative of the political right?
JEFF CHESTER: Ferree himself may not be ideological, but what he showed at the FCC is he is willing to do anything to please his superiors. If that means coming up with a research agenda which shows, surprisingly, that yes, we have a tremendous competition in media today, if it means not having public hearings about the future of public broadcasting, as he failed to have public hearings at the FCC on ownership, Ferree will deliver to the CPB board whatever it takes to accomplish their agenda, and that's a dangerous situation.
BOB GARFIELD: One of the later developments is the appointment of a couple of ombudsmen to monitor the, the content of public broadcasting. Is this part of the same deal?
JEFF CHESTER: Yeah, the CPB board is ratcheting up the pressure on public broadcasting, appointing these two ombudspersons who have this far-ranging mandate to investigate any programming on radio or television, even those programs not federally funded. So what CPB is saying is, you know, we're watching you, PBS and NPR, and if we don't like the programming you air, well, we're going to have an investigation.
BOB GARFIELD: Jeff, just one point of disclosure here. Your Center for Digital Democracy is funded in part by the Schumann Foundation, the president of which is--?
JEFF CHESTER: Bill Moyers.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I just want to observe that if Dan Rather is the poster child for liberal bias in the commercial media, then I, I guess Bill Moyers plays the same role in public broadcasting.
JEFF CHESTER: The Schumann Foundation has funded my organization for a number of years to work on issues not related to public broadcasting, but I personally have been involved with public broadcasting issues for more than 20 years, and I have grown alarmed about this current attack, which is why we are focusing on it.
BOB GARFIELD: All right, Jeff. Well, thank you very much.
JEFF CHESTER: Thank you, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: Jeff Chester is executive director for the Center for Digital Democracy. Karen Everhart is senior editor and writer for Current, the newspaper about public broadcasting. Karen, welcome to OTM.
KAREN EVERHART: Thank you for having me.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, we've just heard from Jeff Chester, who spoke of an overt political agenda to strangle the powerful content of public broadcasting from the top. Do you see things differently?
KAREN EVERHART: Well, I do somewhat. I just came back from the PBS convention in Las Vegas, where I, I was able to talk to a CPB board member who is a minority board member. She's an independent. She's not part of the Republican majority. And she talked to me about the decision to not retain Ms. Cox on her contract, and she said it wasn't driven by any particular issue or any of the things that have come up. It was really more that the board was looking for someone who could provide more dynamic leadership.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, but you did, you know, use the phrase "Republican-controlled," and you covered CPB all through the Clinton years.
KAREN EVERHART: Right.
BOB GARFIELD: How would you say the current board stacks up against the board of, say, 10 years ago? I mean is it fair to say that whoever is in the White House is going to stack the deck with political patrons?
KAREN EVERHART: Yes, it is fair to say that. I mean President Clinton did that, and President Bush is doing it. The president can only appoint five members of his own political party to the CPB board, so the remaining four members have to be either Democrats or Independents. Right now, there are five Republicans on the board, two Democrats, and one Independent - and one vacancy. So, this is as Republican as the board can get.
BOB GARFIELD: It might be tempting to dismiss Jeff Chester and others as alarmists, but this is the Bush administration we're talking about, and it certainly hasn't been shy about imposing its political will on other parts of the bureaucracy, including recently the tempest over the animated bunny rabbit Buster, whose post card from a lesbian household in Vermont just caused a, a firestorm of controversy. Can we make a legitimate connection between what's going on at the CPB board level right now and the Department of Education's punitive actions with respect to Buster?
KAREN EVERHART: I can't make that connection for you. The Department of Education provides money directly to PBS through the Ready to Learn program, and so CPB isn't really a player in that whole relationship, in how that whole controversy spun out. You know, I have a much less alarmist view about this, because I've seen the pressure from the left and the right on public broadcasting, and it - over time, it does seem to balance itself out, in my view. The last time that they had a really dynamic leader at CPB was in the early 1990s. His name was Richard Carlson, and people were really afraid, because he was picked by a Republican board, and he was a Republican himself who had contributed to the first President Bush's political campaigns, that he himself was going to wield some muscle over public broadcasting programs and try to influence it. But he didn't. He stepped back from that.
BOB GARFIELD: So Richard Carlson left behind twin legacies. One is his son, Tucker, whose show, Unfiltered, on PBS is explicitly there as an ideological balance. But there's also a sort of poison pill, a re-assertion of the mandate for objectivity, which Carlson in his day didn't make much of, but which the current leadership seems to be following to a T. Tell me about the objectivity mandate.
KAREN EVERHART: In this instance, I guess it started around November 2002. There was an outcry over a commentary that Bill Moyers delivered on his weekly PBS program, Now with Bill Moyers. And the CPB board members really didn't like him editorializing on the air. What he did was he talked about the Republican electoral gains in the 2002 mid-term elections in a very, very provocative way. So, since that time, they have done a number of things to try to put forward the notion that stations have to be more assertive of assuring balance and objectivity in their programs. They commission new programs, from Tucker Carlson, as you mentioned, and also the Wall Street Journal, their editorial board; and at this point, they just - right before Kathleen Cox left, they hired two ombudsmen to take a look at programs that are controversial or that people raise questions about.
BOB GARFIELD: It seems to me that the origins of public broadcasting go back to Newton Minnow's famous description of commercial television in the early '60s as being a vast wasteland. And public broadcasting was supposed to be the antidote to the sort of cynicism and commercialization and lowest common denominator aspects of network TV. Was it ever intended to be the Gettysburg of the culture wars between the red states and the blue?
KAREN EVERHART: No, it wasn't. CPB was set up to be a heat shield, to prevent these sort of things from happening, but the way that it's structured, in terms of the political appointments to the CPB board make it very hard to do that, and they are very sensitive to their own political party's interests and the demands about the way the system is performing on its mandate, and the extent to which CPB is able to sort of mitigate those pressures and its own role to sort of protect public broadcasting's editorial integrity as a heat shield - that's really what's at stake here, and it's going to be very interesting to follow over the next few months as these ombudsmen come into play and review programs and make statements about things that are on the air, and as CPB conducts its leadership search.
BOB GARFIELD: Karen, thank you very much.
KAREN EVERHART: Thank you very much for having me.
BOB GARFIELD: Karen Everhart is senior editor and writer for Current, the newspaper on public broadcasting. By the way, On the Media has in the past been a direct recipient of CPB funding. [MUSIC]
copyright 2005 WNYC Radio
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