Public radio woes

Western MA blogger and religious right expert Frederick Clarkson will be on NPR's excellent interview show "Fresh Air" tomorrow (Wednesday).  Locally, you can hear the show at 3 pm on WBUR (90.9 FM).  Congrats, Fred!

Which seems like an opportune moment to note a couple of truly depressing stories I've seen in the NYT over the last couple of weeks.  The latest, from yesterday's paper, reports that the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, together with its Bush-appointee-dominated board of directors, is preparing to direct grants to local radio stations away from news-related programming in favor of more music.  Supposedly this decision arose in part from the thoughtful research conducted by highly-qualified CPB board member Gay Hart Gaines - a Republican fundraiser, head of a Newt Gingrich PAC, and trustee of the Palm Beach (Fla.) Republican party (eek) - in which she apparently had "a conversation" with "a taxi driver" about his "listening habits."  Excellent.  The Corporation is also apparently preparing to "monitor" NPR's coverage of the Middle East for being too pro-Arab.  (Apparently this particular issue is at the behest of CPB board member Cheryl Halpern, another Republican fundraiser whose family "has business interests in Israel," according to the NYT.)

An earlier article reported on Tomlinson's efforts to right-wing-ify public television, including a particular vendetta that Tomlinson undertook against Bill Moyers and his "NOW" show (now hosted by David Brancaccio).  This included, hilariously, spending $10,000 on a consultant to keep track of Moyers' guests and their political leanings.  Now that's the kind of consulting gig I'd like to land - ten thou to watch TV.  (For the record, Moyers routinely invited conservatives as well as liberals onto his show, while the show that Tomlinson crammed down PBS's throat as "balance," which is hosted by the Wall St. Journal's ultraconservative Paul Gigot, is basically a right-wing echo chamber.)

I don't watch all that many public TV shows, but I listen to NPR all the time - it's one of my principal news sources.  And my understanding is that CPB doesn't provide all that much of NPR's budget directly, but that local stations, which have to pay NPR to air the nationally-produced shows like All Things Considered and Morning Edition, depend heavily on CPB grants.  So CPB's move to direct grants to local stations away from news and toward music, if it happens, is a real threat to NPR's programming.

What to do.  Well, NPR recently received a gigantic bequest of over $200 million from Joan Kroc, the widow of the guy who founded the McDonald's fast food empire.  I don't know the extent of the restrictions that Mrs. Kroc placed on that gift, but wouldn't it be great if NPR could use part of it to reduce the cost of its programming to local stations?  In the short term, that could reduce the pain that the increasingly-frequent public radio fundraisers inflict on listeners, and it could also perhaps reduce local stations' dependence on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  I'm not prepared to join in the calls to abolish the CPB, but reducing NPR's susceptibility to political hackery would be all to the good.

UPDATE (5/25): Pat Mitchell, the head of PBS, has responded to Tomlinson's charges of bias in a speech at the National Press Club.