Nixon vetoed the authorization for CPB with a message written in part by his sidekick and soul mate, Pat Buchanan, who castigated Vanocur, McNeil, “Washington Week in Review,” “Black Journal” and Bill Moyers as, (quote), “unbalanced against the administration.” It is familiar. I always knew Nixon would be back, again and again. I just didn’t know that this time he would ask to be Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Buchanan and Nixon succeeded in cutting CPB funding for all public affairs programming, except for “Black Journal.” They knocked out most of your funding for the National Public Affairs Center for Television, otherwise known as NPACT. And they voted to take away from the PBS staff the ultimate responsibility for the production of programming.

But in those days – and this is what I wanted to share with Kenneth Tomlinson, who I have never met, and his colleagues on the CPB board -- in those days there were still Republicans in America who did not march in ideological lockstep and who stood on principle against politicizing public television. The chairman of the public station in Dallas was an industrialist named Ralph Rogers, a Republican but no party hack, who saw the White House intimidation as an assault on freedom of the press and led a nationwide effort to stop it. The chairman at the time of the CPB was a former Republican Congressman, Thomas Curtis, from here in St. Louis – from here in Missouri, who was also a principled man. He resigned, claiming White House interference. Within a few months, the crisis was over. CPB maintained its independence, PBS grew in strength, and Richard Nixon would face impeachment and resign for violating the public trust and not just public broadcasting. Paradoxically, the very -- talk about justice. In fact, I once asked a wise – a friend of mine, a wise old man in Washington, what he had learned from life, could he reduce it to one sentence? And he said, “Yes. There ain’t no justice in the world. Now, get on with it.”

But here was cosmic justice. The very Public Affairs Center for Television that Nixon had tried to kill, NPACT, put PBS on the map by re-broadcasting in prime time each day’s Watergate hearings, drawing huge ratings night after night and establishing PBS as an ally of democracy. We should still be doing that sort of thing. C-SPAN, bless its heart, shouldn’t be the only channel that lets us see how democracy works.

That was thirty-three years ago and I thought the current CPB board would like to hear and talk about the importance of standing up to political interference. I was wrong. They wouldn’t meet with me. I tried three times and failed three times, and it was all downhill after that. I was naive, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying out for the White House. But that’s what Kenneth Tomlinson has been doing. On Fox News this week he denied he’s carrying out a White House mandate or that he’s ever had any conversation with any Bush administration official about PBS. But The New York Times reports that he enlisted Karl Rove to help kill a proposal that would have put on the CPB board people with experience in local radio and television.

It was also reported that on the recommendation of administration officials, he hired a White House flack -- I know the genre -- named Mary Catherine Andrews, as a senior staff member at CPB. While she was still reporting to Karl Rove at the White House, she set up CPB’s new ombudsman office and had a hand in hiring the two people who will fill it, one of them who once worked for Tomlinson, the other a very respected journalist. But this is an anomaly. A political organization can’t have an ombudsman. CPB is not a journalistic or newsgathering organization. PBS can have one. WGBH can have one. WNET can have one. But for a political organization to have two ombudsmen or one ombudsman or a dozen? I would like to give Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t.

According to a book written about the Reader’s Digest when he was with – when he was its Editor-in-Chief, he surrounded himself with other right wingers, a pattern he’s now following for the staff at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I’ve already mentioned Miss Andrews. Well, for Acting President he hired Ken Ferree from the FCC who was Michael Powell’s enforcer when Powell was deciding how to go about allowing the big media companies to get even bigger. One of Ferree’s jobs, as Jeff Chester will say in his book coming out in the next several months, was to engage in tactics designed to dismiss any serious objection to more media monopolies. And according to Eric Alterman, Ferree was even more contemptuous than Michael Powell of public participation in the process of determining media ownership. It was Ferree who decided to issue a protective order designed to keep secret the market research on which the Republican majority on the commission based their vote to permit greater media consolidation.

Now, let me say, it is not likely that with a guy like that as the chief operating officer of the CPB you’re going to find any public television producer say, “Hey, let’s do something on how big media is affecting democracy.” Because what this leads to is preventive capitulation.

As everyone knows, Mr. Tomlinson has put up a considerable sum of money, allegedly over five million dollars, your money, for the new weekly broadcast featuring Paul Gigot and the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. Now, Gigot is a smart journalist, a sharp editor and a fine fellow. I had him on “NOW” several times, and I even proposed to PBS that he become a regular contributor on our show, the conversation of democracy, remember? All stripes. But I confess to some puzzlement that The Wall Street Journal, which in the past editorialized to cut PBS off the public tap, is now being subsidized by American taxpayers when its parent company, Dow Jones, had revenues in the first quarter of this year, of four hundred million dollars. I thought public television was supposed to be an alternative to commercial media, not a funder of it.

But in this weird deal, you get a glimpse of the kind of programming Mr. Tomlinson apparently seems to prefer. Alone of the big major newspapers, The Wall Street Journal, has no op-ed page where different opinions can compete with its right wing editorials. The Journal’s PBS broadcast is just as homogenous: right wingers talking to each other. I think, Bob McChesney, you ought to demand equal time for Katrina vanden Heuvel and the editors of The Nation, or for Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, now there’s an idea for you. You want public broadcasting to be balanced against all these elite establishment voices that get heard? Get Amy on public television.

We didn’t know this a year ago. We just learned it from The New York Times two weeks ago that last year Mr. Tomlinson had spend ten thousand dollars to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That’s right. He spent ten thousand dollars of your money to hire a guy to watch “NOW” to find out who my guests were and what my stories were. Ten thousand dollars. Gee, Ken, for two dollars and fifty cents a week, you could pick up a copy of TV Guide on the newsstand. A subscription is even cheaper, and I would have sent you a coupon that can save you up to sixty-two percent. Or, for that matter, Ken, all you had to do was watch the show. You could have made it easier with a double Jim Beam, your favorite. Or you could -- mine, too. We have some things in common. Or you could go online, where the listings are posted. Hell, Ken, you could have called me collect, and I would have told you who we were having on the show.