Changing the CPB
News: The tumultuous reign of Kenneth Tomlinson has reformers working to ensure that it won't happen again.
November 16, 2005
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According to an internal investigation made public today, Kenneth Tomlinson, the former chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, "violated statutory provisions and the Director's Code of Ethics" when he used "political tests" to hire Patricia Harrison, a former co-chair of the Republican Party, as president and CEO of the agency. In the report, Inspector General Kenneth Konz also faulted Tomlinson for improperly hiring a consultant to monitor public programming for liberal bias without the board's consent. Tomlinson had already resigned his seat on the CPB board on November 3rd as members were reviewing advance copies of the report.
Tomlinson sparked controversy during his tenure as chairman when he accused public radio and television of suffering from "liberal bias." (Internal CPB polls showed that the general public sees no serious bias problem.) His actions pleased right-wing activists, while alienating much of the public broadcasting community. "There's been such controversy. And there's a perception that CPB needs to be fixed," says John Lawson, president of the Association of Public Television Stations.
Many media reformers and public broadcasters see Tomlinson's tumultuous reign as evidence that the board's structure doesn't adequately insulate it from partisan control. As required by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the CPB's nine board members are nominated by the president to serve staggered six-year terms. Members must be approved by the Senate commerce committee and confirmed by the full Senate, and no more than five can hail from the same political party. But for many, these constraints aren't enough. "The core concept of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is to serve as a heat shield between Congress and the people's networks," says Ben Scott of Free Press, a media reform organization. "To me it’s a contradiction that a politically-appointed board could fill that role."
Indeed, under Tomlinson, as well as at other key points in its nearly 40-year history, the board has occasionally been turned into a partisan battleground. Only Watergate stopped Richard Nixon from stocking the board with appointees who would vote the White House line, a process Nixon initiated after being angered by a series of public television documentaries in 1970 that were implicitly critical of his administration's economic policies. In 1985, meanwhile, Republicans on the board refused to fund a programming sales trip by Ed Pfister, then CPB president, to Moscow—a move generally seen as motivated by Cold War considerations. (Pfister resigned shortly thereafter in protest.)
Moreover, concerns over the quality and qualifications of the board's members have been persistent. "If they'd followed through with the original idea, Walter Cronkite would be on the CPB Board—someone with that kind of journalism or cultural stature," laments Jack Mitchell, a former chair of NPR's board. But in general, presidents have not met that standard. "Frankly, it's not the highest-ranking appointment," says Mitchell. "It's a place where the Administration can send someone who needs an appointment but who, for whatever reason, would be too embarrassing to give an ambassadorship."
Past CPB appointees by presidents of both parties are a notable but not necessarily distinguished lot, including spouses of cabinet secretaries, campaign strategists, major party donors, or former staffers of the Commerce Committee—the Senate body that oversees the CPB. Some board members that won appointments through political connections have proved to be capable and valuable members. But to public broadcasting observers, that’s been the exception, not the rule.
The Bush administration, for its part, has appointed members with a long record of donations and involvement with Republican candidates and causes. In August of 2002 Bush used a recess appointment to install Cheryl Halpern on the board. Halpern and her husband have given nearly half a million dollars to Republican causes since 1989. Gay Hart Gaines also came to the board on December 26, 2003, via a controversial recess appointment. In 2004, she became a Bush Campaign "Pioneer" after collecting more than $100,000 on behalf of the president's reelection effort.
Bush has not been as eager to put Democrats on the board. In March of 2003, then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle recommended Chon Noriega, a UCLA professor of Film and Television Studies for one of the Democratic seats on the board. The White House refused to pass the nomination on to the Senate. Until Tomlinson's recent resignation this meant that the board's two Democrats were outmatched by five Republicans. (The board currently has one independent.) Reports indicate that Senate Minority leader Harry Reid tapped former Senator David Pryor to fill the empty seat in July 2005. The Bush administration has, again, not yet acted to move the nomination. On September 26 the board elected Halpern as chair, and Gaines as vice-chair; in the past the latter post has been held by a member of the minority party. Both votes were, not surprisingly, five in favor, and three opposed.
Celia Wexler, the vice-president for advocacy at Common Cause and a specialist in media issues, has been keeping an eye on the board, and the twin issues of lackluster appointees and potential politicization. "We've been concerned about this for quite a while, long before Tomlinson and Harrison came along. It's not just Republicans who have been doing this, it's been Democrats too." Wexler points out that Clinton's CPB appointees included old friends from Arkansas and major Democratic donors—people she thinks "didn't have the right stuff."
Over its 40 year history, there have been several attempts to reengineer the CPB board to boost its quality and decrease its potential for politicization. In 1979, a Carnegie Foundation commission recommended that the President only be allowed to select nominees from a short-list to be compiled by the leaders of various federal academic and humanities organizations. There is a provision in the Public Broadcasting Act—often ignored by Presidents—mandating that the public radio and public television communities each have one representative on the board. In 2003, in the midst of the Gaines and Halpern appointments, the Association of Public Televisions Stations (APTS) used this language to leverage Beth Courtney, a Louisiana Public Television official, onto the board. The next summer, APTS lobbied Congress to double the mandated amount of public broadcasting representatives on the board. Tomlinson and CPB officials hired two Republican lobbyists to help them monitor and provide strategic advice aimed at stopping the proposal.
Last week, hoping to take advantage of the window opened by the report's release, APTS floated a new set of legislative recommendations. They propose adding five members to the board (the heads of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the national endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation), reducing the number of Presidential appointees from nine to eight, and mandating that no more than four be from the same political party.
APTS hopes that the mandatory appointees would act as a counterbalance against political appointees, while overall board quality by placing the CPB in the ranks of other respected—and government supported—arts, science, and education foundations. Using the attention that Tomlinson brought to the board's shortcoming as a launching pad, the organization is hoping to garner bipartisan support for its proposals as it works in next year's congress to reauthorize the Public Broadcasting Act. After enduring this Tomlinson episode, reformers hope that the CPB can be changed in time to forestall a sequel.
Clint Hendler is an editorial fellow at Mother Jones
