IT CAN HAPPEN HERE by Joe Conason

Author:Joe Conason [Conason, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Published: 2010-04-01T05:00:00+00:00

THE PETTY SCANDALS of payola punditry and fake TV reporters represented small yet visible missteps by a government determined to control public opinion with the public’s money. The Republican regime conducted a far more significant assault on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), openly seeking to impose ideological supervision over the nationwide public television network. Conservatives have warned Americans for years that the liberal commissars of political correctness would someday foist their opinions on the rest of us using our own tax dollars. In reality they became the commissars, with their own politically correct conservative orthodoxy and Republican party line.

Not long after Bush appointed Kenneth Tomlinson to head the CPB (2003), the new chairman began to extend partisan political control over the network with all the subtlety of an old-style Soviet hack. As a former Reader’s Digest editor and Republican appointee, he knew what Rove had chosen him to do.

He quickly hired a Bush White House communications flack named Mary Catherine Andrews to set up a new “office of the ombudsman” to oversee the ideological content of public television and radio broadcasts. Prior to joining the CPB, Andrews had served as director of the White House Office of Global Communications. So eager was she to get to work in her new post that she began while still under the watchful eye of Karl Rove, the president’s chief political adviser and a longtime crony of Tomlinson.

According to the New York Times, Ms. Andrews “helped draft the office’s guiding principles, set up a Web page and prepared a news release about the appointment of the [two] new ombudsmen,” whom she apparently helped to select.

One of the ombudsmen was another former Reader’s Digest editor known for his conservative Republicanism, while the other was a retired TV correspondent who had endorsed the GOP candidate for governor of Indiana and held a fellowship at the right-wing Hudson Institute. Thus did the Bush administration propose to ensure objective and balanced broadcasting.

Tomlinson secretly hired a consultant to inspect the content of NOW with Bill Moyers, the public TV program that most often irritated the Republican right. The consultant predictably tarred Moyers as anti-Bush, despite the many conservative guests on his program, from which he was ultimately evicted. The veteran journalist had been branded an enemy of the state.

It was in Tomlinson’s engineering of top appointments, however, that his urge to mimic the authoritarian style approached parody. Having ousted the former CPB president, whose ideological leanings were deemed suspicious, he replaced her with yet another Republican placeholder, soon to be replaced by Patricia Harrison—a State Department official and former cochair-woman of the Republican National Committee.

Under the tutelage of Rove, the Republicans placed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with executive authority and $400 million in federal funding, under the control of a former party leader. Had Bill Clinton dared to choose a former Democratic Party chair to oversee public broadcasting, every right-thinking pundit and politician would have screamed for the immediate and total defunding of CPB and the appointment of a special prosecutor, while making angry comparisons with Soviet Russia.

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