Turning PBS into GOPTV

Dissatisfied with control over the White House, the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate, and Supreme Court, talk radio and most cable news programs, the Republican Party has set its site on the lone holdout of moderate expression, the Public Broadcasting Service.

As the NewYork Times pointed out on May 1, the Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is aggressively pressing public television to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias, prompting some public broadcasting leaders - including the chief executive of PBS - to object that his actions pose a threat to editorial independence.

Long a symbol of liberal propaganda to the right for uncovering stories that the right would prefer not be told, chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson is putting the squeeze on the few liberal programs on television. Without the knowledge of his board, the chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, contracted last year with an outside consultant to keep track of the guests' political leanings on one program, "Now With Bill Moyers" and encouraged corporation and public broadcasting officials to broadcast "The Journal Editorial Report," whose host, Paul Gigot, is editor of the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.

While this might seem small, what Tomlinson is doing is putting a microscope on a program that includes guests from all political persuasions while placing the extremist Wall Street Journal editorial board under the same microscope.

Should anyone really be surprised? No. But the questions is what should be done. Jonathan Chait of the Los Angeles Times suggests Cut the strings of government funding before right-wingers can destroy public broadcasting pointing out that while Newt Gingrich sought to slash or eliminate programs he considered wasteful, Bush turns those programs into arms of his political machine.

While many people think of Bush as an idiot, perhaps he is a genius, actually an evil genius. Bush takes a program like PBS and gives people the choice - either it will be run his way or get rid of it. So in order to save PBS it will have survive in the marketplace, not sustained like defense contractors with public money.

Yet there already are a number of cable networks that offer children's programming and nature shows, just few that offer real, in-depth analysis of the news, although anyone who watched PBS' Once Upon A Time in Arkansas investigation into whitewater must have thought it a FOX News production.

While those on the right may be drawn to support networks running questionable stories about Christmas under siege or trashing American war heroes, those on the left may not be as willing to support investigative stories on stolen elections or politicians shirking their military duties. So at the end of the day the right has figured out another way to get their message out, now it will be at the public expense.