This week, two House Democrats wrote to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, calling for an investigation into CPB Chairman Ken Tomlinson’s efforts to move PBS to the right.
“Recent news reports suggesting that the CPB increasingly is making personnel and funding decisions on the basis of political ideology are extremely troubling,” Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.) wrote in a letter sent late yesterday to CPB Inspector General Kenneth Konz.
The ranking members on the Energy and Commerce and Appropriations committees, respectively, asked Konz to investigate several recent CPB activities and to turn over all relevant documents to them.
Specifically, they call for an investigation of a report that without the knowledge of his board, Tomlinson contracted an outside consultant last year to monitor the “political content” of PBS’s “Now With Bill Moyers” for “anti-Bush,” “anti-business” and “anti-Tom DeLay” “biases.”
With the kind of efficiency one rarely sees in Washington these days, Konz responded to the letter by launching an immediate probe.
The inspector general of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has agreed to investigate some of the activities of CPB Chairman Ken Tomlinson, including the hiring of an outside consultant to monitor the political leanings of guests on the PBS public affairs program “Now.” […]
Konz did tell the Associated Press, “We are committed to performing a review and looking at the record and giving [Reps. Dingell and Obey] the information they asked for.”
Tomlinson, of course, is saying all the right things — he “welcomes” the lawmakers’ concerns and he “looks forward” to the inspector general’s investigation — but this obviously isn’t good news for him.
After all, Tomlinson, who last year told the Association of Public Television Stations they should make sure their programming “better reflected the Republican mandate,” may soon find this probe getting in the way of his drive to remake PBS into a more Fox-News like network.