The Public Broadcasting Scandal
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Congressmen John Dingell and David Obey and the New York Times are in a lather over Kenneth Tomlinson’s just-ended chairmanship at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They’re particularly incensed over a report released yesterday by CPB’s inspector general, for which Messrs. Dingell and Obey pressed, that suggests Mr. Tomlinson “broke the law” in the course of pursuing his attempt to restore some balance to public broadcasting. They’re especially steamed up over the $4 million that Mr. Tomlinson helped secure for a weekly broadcast on PBS by the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper that has, over the years, done the most to expose the abuses of power by – you guessed it – Congressmen Dingell and Obey and that is the most important competitor of – you guessed again – the New York Times.
In a perfect world, taxpayers wouldn’t have to fund any television, as we wrote in an editorial, “A Subsidy to Celebrate,” when the Journal’s show first hit the airwaves in 2004. But in the imperfect world of PBS, we don’t mind saying that we think the millions that the government has extracted from taxpayers and used to subsidize the Wall Street Journal’s broadcast is the best subsidy the government has ever made. The Journal’s editorial page editor, Paul Gigot, and his colleagues are among the finest journalists in the country and important voices in the struggle for economic and political freedom in America and abroad. Still, we also don’t mind saying that those of us who have been out on the hustings trying to raise private capital for journalism, broadcast and print, find it hard to see the logic in the government reaching its hand into our wallet and ladling this money out to PBS and National Public Radio under the auspices of the CPB.
That is the scandal. The scandal is not that Mr. Tomlinson has sought to restore some balance to the political bias in public television and radio, which, to most Americans must seem tilted beyond recognition. The big scandal is that the government is funding journalism at all in an age when plenty of diverse programming is available in the free market. When did this become one of the delegated powers, the business of government? Why is this not an abridgement of the press? Where are the First Amendment purists?
The inspector general’s report focuses on Mr. Tomlinson’s allegedly improper attempts to use his position on CPB’s board to influence programming decisions, including the decision to fund the Wall Street Journal program. It may be that in some technical sense Mr. Tomlinson committed a managerial misdemeanor in his zeal to give the public fair public broadcasting, although in a letter attached to the report, Mr. Tomlinson denies any wrongdoing and calls the report’s conclusions “malicious and irresponsible.” But if it’s a misdemeanor to ensure that conservative views get a hearing in this government-funded public square, it only underscores that the real felony here is that the taxpayers are funding these channels and programs at all.