The public paid for that study, but Ken Tomlinson acts as if he owns it. Let’s see it. You can watch my bias. You can watch my mistakes. You can watch everything I do right there on the air. We have the funders listed, everything is there, it’s all listed. But he won’t do it. In a May 10th op-ed piece in Reverend Moon’s conservative Washington Times, Ken Tomlinson maintained he had not released the findings because public broadcasting is such a delicate institution he did not want to, (quote), “damage public broadcasting’s image with controversy.” Where I come from in Texas, we shovel that kind of stuff every day.

As we learned this week, that’s not the only news Mr. Tomlinson tried to keep to himself. As Dr. Wilson indicated, and as reported by Jeff Chester’s Center for Digital Democracy, which the Human Center for Media and Democracy also support, there were two public opinion surveys commissioned by CPB, but not released to the media, not even to PBS and NPR. According to a source who talked to Salon.com, the first results were too good and Tomlinson didn’t believe them. After the Iraq war, the board commissioned another round of polling, and they thought they’d get worse results, but they didn’t.

This is the man, by the way, who was running the Voice of America back in 1984 when a fanatic named Charlie Wick was politicizing the United States Information Agency of which Voice of America was a part. It turned out there was a blacklist of people who had been removed from the list of prominent Americans sent abroad to lecture on behalf of America and the USIA. What’s more, it was discovered that evidence as to how those people were chosen to be on the blacklist, more than seven hundred documents, had been shredded. Among those on the blacklist of journalists, writers, scholars and politicians were dangerous left wing subversives like Walter Cronkite, James Baldwin, Gary Hart, Ralph Nader, Ben Bradley, Coretta Scott King and David Brinkley.

The person who took the fall for the blacklist was another right winger. He resigned. Shortly thereafter, so did Kenneth Tomlinson, who was one of six people in the agency with the authority to see the list of potential speakers and allowed to strike people’s names. Let me be clear: I don’t know, and there’s no record of what position Kenneth Tomlinson took, whether he supported the blacklist or opposed it or what he thinks of it now. I actually hoped Bill O’Reilly would have asked him about it when he appeared on “The O’Reilly Factor” this week. He didn’t. Instead, Tomlinson went on attacking me with O’Reilly egging him on, and went on denying he was carrying out a partisan mandate. The only time you could be sure he was telling the truth was at the end of the broadcast when he said to O’Reilly, “We love your show.” We? We love your show? He’s entitled to his opinion. He’s entitled to his politics. He’s entitled to contribute exclusively, as he does to conservative candidates for public office. That’s all fine. Our political system encourages it and tolerates it. But he is not entitled to stand in judgment on other people’s bias.

On Friday I wrote Kenneth Tomlinson. I asked him to sit down with me for an hour on PBS and talk about all this. I said, “You can choose the moderator, although I don’t see that we need one, two civilized human beings sitting and talking about these important issues affecting the future of a medium we both profess to love.” I said, “You can choose the guidelines.” But there’s one thing in particular – and I’m about to close. There’s one thing in particular I would like to ask him about. In that op-ed essay this week in The Washington Times, Ken Tomlinson talks of a phone call from an old friend complaining about Bill Moyers’s bias. The friend explained that the foundation he heads made a six figure contribution to his local public television station for digital conversion. But he declared, and I’m quoting Tomlinson, “There would be no more contributions until something was done about the network’s bias.”

Apparently, that’s Kenneth Tomlinson’s method of governance. Money talks and buys the influence it wants. But I’d like to ask him to listen to a different voice. This letter came to me last year, five pages of handwriting. It said, in essence, and I’m going to do some direct quoting: “After the worst sneak attack in our history, there has not been a moment to reflect, a moment to let the horror resonate, to feel the pain and regroup as humans. No, since I lost my husband on 9/11, not only our family’s world but the whole world seems to have gotten even worse than that tragic day. On 9/11, my husband was not on duty. He was home with me having coffee. Our own family story on that day is long and complicated. My daughter and grandson, living only five blocks from the tower, had to be evacuated with marks, terror all around. My other daughter, near the Brooklyn Bridge, my son in high school. But my Charlie took off like a lightning bolt to be with his men from the special operations command. ‘Bring my gear to the plaza,’ he told his aid immediately after the first plane struck the north tower. In comparison to using semantic technicalities, passing the responsibility or not having all the facts, he took action based on the responsibility he felt for his job and his men and for those towers he loved. In the Fire Department of New York chain of command, rules extend to every captain of every firehouse in the city. If anything happens in the firehouse at any time, even if the captain isn’t on duty and is on vacation, that captain is responsible for everything that goes on there twenty-four/seven. Why then,” she asks, “are the people in Washington responsible for nothing? Why do they pass the blame for what happened that day, for the failure of the system, for the torture at Abu Ghraib, for sending young soldiers into an immoral war, under-equipped, under-trained and under-protected? Why is there no leadership? We need more programs like ‘NOW’ to wake us up,” she said. “More programs like ‘NOW’ and your series with Joseph Campbell, which my husband and I so enjoyed watching together. Such programs must continue amidst the sea of false images and name calling that divide America now. Such programs give us hope that search will continue to get this imperfect human condition on to a higher plain. So thank you and all of those who work with you at Channel 13, my flagship station, and PBS. Without public broadcasting, all we would call news would be very carefully controlled propaganda.”

Framed above my desk at my office is the check she made out to Channel 13, “NOW,” for five hundred dollars. When I go discouraged or need to remind myself that public media truly matter, I look at that check and think of the woman who wrote it and the husband who did his duty, and their belief in us. And I will take, over the big check that Ken Tomlinson could have gotten from a demanding right winger, I would take the widow’s mite any day.

Courtesy of Democracy Now

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