Lobbyists' Role for Public TV Is Investigated

[Chauga]

Investigators at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are examining $15,000 in payments to two Republican lobbyists last year that were not disclosed to the corporation's board, people involved in the inquiry said on Wednesday.

One of the lobbyists was retained at the direction of the corporation's Republican chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, they said, and the other at the suggestion of his Republican predecessor, who remains on the board.

The investigators, in the corporation's inspector general's office, are also examining $14,170 in payments made under contracts - which Mr. Tomlinson took the unusual step of signing personally, also without the knowledge of board members - with a man in Indiana who provided him with reports about the political leanings of guests on the "Now" program when its host was Bill Moyers.

While the amounts of the contracts are relatively small, the issues they pose are part of a broader examination by the inspector general of Mr. Tomlinson's efforts to bring what he says is more political balance to public television and radio and what critics say is political interference in programming.


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/16/politics/16broadcast.html?hp&ex=1118894400&en=132b8d077df93b85&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[intheflow]

1. Welcome to DU, Chauga.

Nice post for a newbie. :hi:

I nominated it. I'm glad to see some shit come down over Moyers' leaving his own show because of pressure to curb his free speech.

[intheflow]

2. My local PBS station just asked viewers to call

their elected officials. This is important. One more vote to go for greatest page. :kick:

[roguevalley]

3. so the fascists are vetting guests on shoes. how stalinist of them.

[salin]

4. did you catch who one of the lobbyists was?

One of the lobbyists, Brian Darling, was paid $10,000 for his insights into Senator Conrad Burns, a Montana Republican who sponsored the provision. This year, he briefly served as a top aide to Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida, but resigned after the disclosure that he had written a memorandum describing how to exploit politically the life-support case of Terri Schiavo.

[Tesla]

5. Eeeewwwwwwwwwww

Even the names are freaky..... Brian Darling and Con Burns???
you can here them on the phone now..."How are you Brian, Darling?
Fine, Con-Rad, how bout you?

I need a shower now.......

[Sydnie]

6. Moyers made a wonderful speech about these lobbyists

It was shown on C-SPAN and was available on Democracy Now on line. Moyers said that they could have saved the money they spent to investigate his guests by just calling him and asking him about them. Moyers also said that they paid $10,000 for someone to report who the guests were -- that they could have saved some money there too if they had just gotten a subscription to TV Guide. Perhaps Darling was who was to watch the shows and report who the guests were?

That's a great deal of money to get paid to watch a show!

Here's that part of his speech --

<snip>

We didn’t know this a year ago. We just learned it from The New York Times two weeks ago that last year Mr. Tomlinson had spend ten thousand dollars to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That’s right. He spent ten thousand dollars of your money to hire a guy to watch “NOW” to find out who my guests were and what my stories were. Ten thousand dollars. Gee, Ken, for two dollars and fifty cents a week, you could pick up a copy of TV Guide on the newsstand. A subscription is even cheaper, and I would have sent you a coupon that can save you up to sixty-two percent. Or, for that matter, Ken, all you had to do was watch the show. You could have made it easier with a double Jim Beam, your favorite. Or you could -- mine, too. We have some things in common. Or you could go online, where the listings are posted. Hell, Ken, you could have called me collect, and I would have told you who we were having on the show.

The public paid for that study, but Ken Tomlinson acts as if he owns it. Let’s see it. You can watch my bias. You can watch my mistakes. You can watch everything I do right there on the air. We have the funders listed, everything is there, it’s all listed. But he won’t do it. In a May 10th op-ed piece in Reverend Moon’s conservative Washington Times, Ken Tomlinson maintained he had not released the findings because public broadcasting is such a delicate institution he did not want to, (quote), “damage public broadcasting’s image with controversy.” Where I come from in Texas, we shovel that kind of stuff every day.

<end clip>

You can read the whole speech here - http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/16/1329245#transcript

[intheflow]

7. Kick

:kick: