I was being grilled by the Inspector General for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting about emails I had written when I was CPB chairman.
Waving a sheet of paper for emphasis, he declared, “This email is the worst of all. This demonstrates you were seeking to politicize public broadcasting.”
I asked for the email and saw that in response to a question from the head of White House personnel about what are the qualifications to be President of CPB, I stated, tongue-in-cheek: “Loyalty to the President—and patience to put up with the left wingers who control public broadcasting.”
I looked up at the IG, and explained, seriously: “Accusing me of politicizing public broadcasting is like charging someone with introducing lipstick to Las Vegas!”
National Public Radio’s outrageous firing of Juan Williams has prompted an outpouring of demands that Congress defund the operation. (Who can forget the arrogance of NPR CEO Vivian Schiller as she looked into television cameras to assert that Juan’s feelings about seeing Muslims at airports should be “between him and his psychiatrist or his publicist—take your pick.”)
On reflection, I suspect Schiller did us a favor. I had long believed that the many tentacles of public broadcasting should be reformed—not defunded. I now realize I was wrong. Federal funding for NPR should be eliminated—as should handouts to CPB and PBS.
In fact, that is the conclusion of Williams, now that he has been freed from any obligation to his former employer.
As Williams explained Friday morning, let the fate of public broadcasting be decided by listeners and viewers—like that of other broadcast networks.
I literally had public broadcasting liberals explain to me that the taxpayer was obligated to fund NPR to provide the public balance to Rush Limbaugh. Of course liberals were about all I encountered in public broadcasting.
In my time of traveling the country for CPB, I encountered only two state programs that were genuinely politically balanced and I can count the number of conservative public broadcasting employees on one hand.
Indeed, the dirty little secret from the creation of public broadcasting is that the Nixon White House foolishly devised a scheme of conflicting controls over what would become vast NPR and PBS empires. In reality, that placed the real power in the hands of liberal bureaucrats inside the system. And that’s not going to change unless we cut off their funds.
Going after Juan Williams was outrageous, but these people did the nation a favor. And after we defund public broadcasting, we will wonder why it took us so long.
Kenneth Tomlinson served a term-limited two years as chairman of the CPB. He is the former editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest.
