Word: tomlinson
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...enjoyed about as much ... as I can stand." KENNETH TOMLINSON, former chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, convening his final meeting after a rocky two-year term in which he led a charge against what he called public television's "liberal advocacy journalism...
...Tomlinson, 60, a former Reader's Digest editor with a soft Appalachian drawl, tells TIME he had hoped to bring quiet change. "I worked for a year and a half inside the system to rectify" the bias issue, he says. Yet his moves--hiring a G.O.P. activist to monitor the political balance of the news show Now with Bill Moyers, bringing in CPB ombudsmen to police bias, shepherding the conservative Journal Editorial Report onto air--rankled some within and outside public broadcasting. John Lawson, president of the Association of Public Television Stations, says the problem...
Democrats too have questioned the propriety of those actions: the Now researcher was paid more than $14,000, and Tomlinson worked with a White House official to design the ombudsmen posts. But Tomlinson denies that he is advancing Republican interests. "Every time Bill Moyers goes on the air," he says, "it helps [the G.O.P.] in the red states...
...cheered last week when the House rejected the proposed $100 million cut to the CPB's budget. (About $102.5 million for kids' programming and technical upgrades is still cut from the House budget, though the Senate may restore it.) But the political fight is sure to continue, especially after Tomlinson last week helped secure the election of former G.O.P. co-chair Patricia de Stacy Harrison as CPB president...
...charged with shielding public broadcasting from political interference. And Tomlinson, who was first named to the CPB board by President Clinton, says that has been exactly his intention. "We needed balance for the sake of public broadcasting," he says, "so that Republicans and conservatives would take it more seriously." His critics counter that he just wants to pressure it to lean right. Says Jeff Chester, executive director of the liberal Center for Digital Democracy: "The idea that a schedule filled with the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Antiques Roadshow, children's programming and British mystery classics is a shrill liberal bastion...