Reported as Fact: NOW with Bill Moyers Had a Liberal Bias

What bothers me most about the mainstream media’s coverage of the Inspector-General’s smack-down of Ken Tomlinson (former board chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) isn’t the fact that he resigned. The man was an obvious political toady and my only surprise is that he lasted as long as he did. It isn’t even the fact that he lobbyed openly for arch-conservative programming on PBS — watch one episode of the (Wall Street) Journal Editorial Report and try to stay awake, I dare you. The impact on the overall viewership of PBS was minimal, I can tell you, because none of us were able to keep our eyes open past the first ten minutes. It was better cure for insomnia than sleeping pills.

No, what bothered me most about this and continues to bother me is the corporate media’s de facto acceptance of the untruth that Now with Bill Moyers contained an obvious liberal slant that, in Tomlinson’s view, needed to be “balanced.” Perhaps unthinkingly, but certainly irresponsibly, the journalist simply regurgitates what she’s already heard and seen in other reports, accepting as fact that the program in question had a “liberal bias” instead of keeping the question, and the debate, open.

Read the story at the link contained in the title text, above. You’ll see that the reporter didn’t say “alleged bias” or “supposed bias.” She reported Moyers’ excellent journalistic reporting as straight bias, quoting directly from the notorious emails Tomlinson sent to Karl Rove, as the following demonstrates:

Kenneth Tomlinson, who resigned as CPB’s chairman this month, told Rove of his work to balance the liberal PBS program “Now with Bill Moyers,” with a conservative show, “The Journal Editorial Report,” Inspector General Kenneth Konz said in a telephone interview.

Note that the use of the word “liberal” isn’t even inside the quotes, or directly attributable to Tomlinson in this instance.

This kind of reporting only perpetuates untruths — untruths that the media is, in my opinion, responsible for uncovering. Was Now with Bill Moyers slanted to the left, politically? Well, we have Mr. Moyers’ own words, taken from a speech he gave at the National Conference for Media Reform on May 15th of this year and easily verifiable by researching the show’s archives:

I know firsthand that the Public Broadcasting Act was meant to provide an alternative to commercial television and to reflect the diversity of the American people.

This, too, was on my mind when we assembled the team for NOW. It was just after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We agreed on two priorities. First, we wanted to do our part to keep the conversation of democracy going. That meant talking to a wide range of people across the spectrum — left, right and center.

It meant poets, philosophers, politicians, scientists, sages and scribblers. It meant Isabel AlIende, the novelist, and Amity Shlaes, the columnist for the Financial Times. It meant the former nun and best-selling author Karen Armstrong, and it meant the right-wing evangelical columnist Cal Thomas. It meant Arundhati Roy from India, Doris Lessing from London, David Suzuki from Canada, and Bernard Henry-Levi from Paris. It also meant two successive editors of the Wall Street Journal, Robert Bartley and Paul Gigot, the editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel and the L.A. Weekly’s John Powers.

It means liberals like Frank Wu, Ossie Davis and Gregory Nava, and conservatives like Frank Gaffney, Grover Norquist, and Richard Viguerie. It meant Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Bishop Wilton Gregory of the Catholic Bishops conference in this country. It meant the conservative Christian activist and lobbyist, Ralph Reed, and the dissident Catholic Sister Joan Chittister. We threw the conversation of democracy open to all comers.

“All comers.” And I know from viewing the show myself that this was so — Moyers allowed everyone to have their say, whether he personally agreed with them or not. In the finest journalistic tradition, he reported on what was so. He gave us information to use in order to come to our own conclusions. He trusted us to take his work and use it to inform and illuminate our private discussions about the nature of this country we’re continually recreating.

It seems a shame that such honest and straightforward service to the American people and to democracy is treated so shabbily, so casually by his peers. It’s this that upsets me about the ongoing story about Tomlinson — and his overtly conservative bias in chairing the board for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Quote of the Day:What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents. – Robert Kennedy
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