A Giant Yellow Canary Meets a Canard

As I've written before, I'm not a big fan of Frank Rich. His commentary about the doings at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in yesteray's NYT managed to rankle me yet again. Recently a longtime friend of Karl Rove was hired to lead the CPB and ever since, I've heard nothing from liberals except a constant drumbeat about how this is merely an effort by Republicans to inculcate PBS and NPR with their conservative ideology. Similarly there is a movement sponsored by some Republicans in Congress to cut the CPB's funding. Democrats are in a tizzy.

Why all this acrimony and concern?

As Rich correctly points out, the threat to Big Bird is overblown. However, the real concern on the part of Democrats is that the fruits of a publicly-funded communications infrastructure which they have enjoyed almost exclusively for a generation are now under threat of being enjoyed by conservatives. Goose? Meet Gander.

Bully for them, because these publicly-financed outlets have been the sole domain of liberal viewpoints for as long as I can remember. Since I probably watch PBS more than almost any station and have spent a pretty fair chunk of time listening to NPR, I feel qualified to say that these stations typically skew leftward in their coverage. Not generally radical left, but left. New York Times left. It's not even debatable. Whether Tony Brown's Journal, All Things Considered, Frontline, Washington Week, Bill Moyers' NOW, American Experience, BBC World News, Wide Angle, Charlie Rose, BBC World Service, Fresh Air etc. most of the news-related programming tends to have a liberal orientation. For example, this week in New York, we are getting a whole slew of gay and lesbian-oriented programming on the heels of last week's Gay Pride Parade. Out! has been running two programs a night this week.

Over the years I've had surprisingly little complaint about this situation, save for the ocassional head-scratching about why a publicly-funded media outlet was so one-sided in terms of the political viewpoints it disseminated. I say surprisingly because on the whole, the programming is of an extremely high caliber and I believe that most people are intelligent enough to separate the fact from the spin. But even so, I have been strangely accepting of it. But now that it has my attention, why should taxpayers fund all of the programs I listed above with only meager outlays for William F. Buckley (who isn't even on anymore), Louis Ruckeyser, the infrequently broadcast John McLaughlin programs, and only in the last year, The Journal Editorial Report and Tucker Carlson?

So when I read Rich's column today, I was noticeably irritated.

Mr. Tomlinson's real, not-so-hidden agenda is to enforce a conservative bias or, more specifically, a Bush bias. To this end, he has not only turned CPB into a full-service employment program for apparatchiks but also helped initiate "The Journal Editorial Report," the only public broadcasting show ever devoted to a single newspaper's editorial page, that of the zealously pro-Bush Wall Street Journal. Unlike Mr. Moyers's "Now" - which routinely balanced its host's liberalism with conservative guests like Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, Paul Gigot and Cal Thomas - The Journal's program does not include liberals of comparable stature.

This, friends, is a little number I like to call "a canard."

First of all, Frank, what do you think has been going on at CPB since its inception? Complaining about this is like liberals complaining about Rush Limbaugh or Fox News when the Left already holds dominant sway over the mainstream media in this nation, not to mention Hollywood and college campuses. When you've been gaming the system for years, isn't it rather disingenuous to complain when your opponents demand equal (or just more) time as a result of a shift in the political balance of power? Second, the "zealously pro-Bush WSJ" is one thing, but a Washington Week panel populated exclusively by zealously liberal panelists from the Washington Post, New York Times and LA Times is somehow another? Could you be any more transparent in your hypocrisy? And finally, Frank, you're not only going to decry the Journal's existence on PBS but now you deign to select the appropriate guests for the program? Is this anything different than what you complain the Republicans are doing at CPB overall?

Rich does make some valid comparisons between the Armstrong Williams scandal and how Rove is working the CPB. This lends credence to the concern that the pendulum will swing too far the other way. But seriously, what are the ramifications? That we will now get a Republican version of the Democratic networks we've had for years? Could the "consequences" be any more debilitating than the one-worldview perspectives we've been getting heretofore? And couldn't this all just as easily turn itself around the next time the Democrats are in power?

Then again, perhaps this is a persuasive argument for why taxpayers shouldn't be funding media outlets in the first place. For when they do, bureaucrats have this troubling tendency of turning them into political footballs (hat tip: Bill Moyers. Heh.). It seems to me that perhaps PBS and NPR are anachronisms reflecting a bygone era when there weren't enough media outlets or dollars to fund all of the quality programming that was being produced or that viewers were seeking. However, with the fragmentation and proliferation of media accompanied by the rise of new technologies like the Internet there is a large and growing demand for content to feed "the beast." While in 1970 there were real questions as to whether Masterpiece Theater or Sesame Street could gain funding and public exposure, is there any doubt that they would find homes in an environment where the World Series of Poker, The National Spelling Bee, Senate debates and logrolling have managed to flourish? And must it be on the taxpayer's dime?

If it weren't, it certainly would free up Frank Rich and I to disagree about other things.

Food for thought.