This morning’s New York Times is trying to make a scandal out of the news that a government broadcasting executive, Kenneth Tomlinson, hired a friend as a consultant and made calls about his horse-racing hobby from his office. That is the gist of a summary of a State Department investigation the leaking of which the Times attributes to Democratic Congressional staff. The Times reports that, as head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Mr. Tomlinson “had violated rules as he sought more conservative programs” and “improperly intervened to help the staff of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page win a $4.1 million contract — one of the largest programming contracts issued by the corporation — to finance a weekly program on public television.”

The real scandal is that taxpayer dollars are still being spent on domestic broadcasting in an era in which cable and satellite television and radio — not to mention the Internet — have brought increased choices to viewers, without a taxpayer subsidy. Mr. Tomlinson may have tried to counter the ingrained left-wing bias of public television, but it was an uphill battle. The grant the Times is so upset about involves the allocation of public funds to one of the Times’s competitors for a tiny share of the public television dollar. The Times itself has been churning out left-wing investigative journalism in partnership with public television’s “Frontline” program for years.

The “Frontline” Web site is almost a parody, hawking a “much-viewed recent report on Dick Cheney and the CIA, ‘The Dark Side,'” along with a documentary on “American Porn” cautioning that it includes “explicit sexual images.” When Republicans tried to rein this sort of thing in during the Gingrich years in the House, the Democrats cried “Sesame Street,” as if that franchise wouldn’t find a way to pay for itself if the government funding were pulled back. Free market forces in Washington buckled. The truth here is that Kenneth Tomlinson, a great and idealistic journalist, tried to make the Public Broadcasting System more honest — a fact that no amount of mud the Times and its Democratic staff allies on the Hill try to throw at him is going to obscure.