NY Times weighs in for PBS

PBS' squawking is getting louder on the issue of "political bias" within their programming. We've discussed it here http://jerseynut.blogspot.com/2005/04/cpb-and-cbc-go-craaazy.html and here http://jerseynut.blogspot.com/2005/04/pbs-pulls-hair-gnashes-teeth.html ; now the New York Times is reporting that PBS is under right wing attack http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/02/arts/television/02public.html :

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
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."

What's wrong with an outside consultant? Would the Times prefer that Mr. Tomlinson conduct the audit by himself? Moyers is a hate-filled extremist who belongs on Air America, not PBS (See bottom for some links).

Mr. Tomlinson said that he was striving for balance and had no desire to impose a political point of view on programming...
"My goal here is to see programming that satisfies a broad constituency," he said, adding, "I'm not after removing shows or tampering internally with shows."
But he has repeatedly criticized public television programs as too liberal overall, and said in the interview, "I frankly feel at PBS headquarters there is a tone deafness to issues of tone and balance."

Much like most of the newsrooms at broadcasters and newspapers across the country...no wonder staffers at PBS are in shock, for them "balance" means showing lesbian couples as well as male homosexual couples....

And here's something laughingly telling:

Christy Carpenter, a Democratic appointee to the board from 1998 to 2002, said partisanship was "essentially nonexistent" in her first years. But once Mr. Tomlinson, a former editor in chief of Reader's Digest, joined in September 2000 and President Bush's election changed the board's political composition, the tenor changed, she said.

Hmmm, now which political party ran the White House "in her first years"? Geez, why would anyone expect any complaint from the party in power when the government-financed broadcasting company is essentially spouting the party's hard liberal line in both social and international issues?

PBS board members need not worry much - guys like Tomlinson will have to push rightwards for years until PBS even comes close to reaching an approximate center....

REGARDING MOYERS: From TownHall http://www.townhall.com/columnists/brentbozell/bb20041229.shtml
and from Powerline http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/009475.php
- and these do not even represent the tip of the iceberg for this taxpayer-funded liberal bomb-thrower...