Ken Tomlinson’s partisan, ideological, and generally ridiculous work as chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting helped lead to his recent resignation from the CPB. But what we didn’t know before now is just how much Tomlinson violated the law.
The former chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting broke federal law and repeatedly violated the organization’s rules and code of ethics in his efforts to promote conservatives in the system, an endeavor that included consultation with White House officials, according to the findings of an internal investigation made public Tuesday.
The 67-page report — the culmination of a six-month investigation by Kenneth A. Konz, the corporation’s inspector general — portrays former Chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson as a rogue appointee who often exceeded his authority in his determination to address what he viewed as a liberal tilt in public broadcasting.
Among Tomlinson’s transgressions, the former CPB chairman coordinated some employment decisions with White House officials, including Karl Rove, as part of a drive to hire a former Republican Party co-chairwoman. (Tomlinson had previously told reporters he had had “absolutely no contact from anyone at the White House.”) The scheming, Konz said, appears to have run afoul of the Federal Broadcasting Act, which prohibits the use of “political tests” in employment.
For that matter, the law prohibits the CPB chairman from interfering with public broadcast programming, but that didn’t stop Tomlinson from promoting the development of “The Journal Editorial Report,” featuring right-wing commentary from the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. In fact, Tomlinson had no qualms about pushing PBS to broadcast the program while advising Paul Gigot about the program’s format.
The LA Times even noted that Tomlinson was “so zealous in what he termed his pursuit of political balance that he instructed corporation staff to threaten to withhold federal funds from PBS to achieve it,” despite the fact that he didn’t actually have that power.
What bears repeating now, however, is that Tomlinson continues to have a key administration role.
With all the attention given to Tomlinson’s humiliating, amateurish hackery at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it’s easy to forget that Karl Rove also made Tomlinson the head of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, an independent government commission that oversees the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Free Liberty, and Radio Sawa and its sister TV network, Alhurra — making him a key person in America’s international diplomacy.
As Franklin Foer explained in a very good TNR piece in August, Tomlinson has run the BBG just as he ran the CPB, “purging the bureaucracy of political enemies, zealously rooting out perceived ‘liberal bias,’ and generally politicizing institutions that have resisted ideological intrusions for decades.”
And as of earlier this month, as if Tomlinson hadn’t done enough, it got worse.
Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the head of the federal agency that oversees most government broadcasts to foreign countries, including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, is the subject of an inquiry into accusations of misuse of federal money and the use of phantom or unqualified employees, officials involved in that examination said on Friday.
How long will the White House stand by this clown? Are his ties with Rove that significant?