LEANING ON PBS

If conservative members of the board that oversees public broadcasting wanted to know if public television and radio are liberally biased, they didn’t have to sneak around and hire someone to monitor one network program, they simply could have looked at information collected by their own agency.

The chairman of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Ken Tomlinson, is on a campaign, as he says, to restore “balance” to public television and radio programs. He said he’s concerned with perceptions that the networks don’t reflect all parts of the political spectrum.

To build his case, Mr. Tomlinson hired an outside consultant to monitor broadcasts of “Now With Bill Moyers” and look for political bias among its guests, which have included Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. At the same time, Mr. Tomlinson persuaded the networks to broadcast a Wall Street Journal show that only has conservative commentators.

Beyond the problem of building a case on one television show, whose host, Mr. Moyers, left last year, public broadcasting has not lost its balance.

Mr. Tomlinson, a former editor in chief at Reader’s Digest, could have saved the corporation money and simply read a report it paid for. A national survey done in 2003 found that the majority of the public does not believe the news and information programming on public broadcasting is biased. In the survey, done by the Tarrance Group, which has done work for Republican clients including the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign, and Lake Snell Perry & associates, a Democratic polling firm, 21 percent of respondents said public television news and information programming had a liberal bias. A 2002 survey by the same groups found that 31 percent of Americans thought that such programming on the major commercial networks and CNN had a liberal bias. A small number – 12 percent – actually thought there was a conservative bias in public broadcasts, with 48 percent thinking there was no bias either way.

Of course, more Republicans than Democrats felt public broadcasting had a liberal bias, however, both groups report watching or listening to public broadcasting in high numbers (85 percent for Republicans and 87 for Dem-ocrats). More than half those asked said that news and information programming on public television is more trustworthy than that from other sources. Fewer than 15 percent said it was less trustworthy.

Finally, more than three-quarters of those asked said it was important for the federal government to financially support public television. Seventy percent said this of public radio. Only 10 percent said that the $1.30 per capita in taxpayer funds that the public is spending on public broadcasting is too much. Nearly half said this is too little. Even among those who thought public broadcasting has a liberal bias, two-thirds thought government expenditures on public broadcasting were about right or too low.

If Mr. Tomlinson truly wants to improve public broadcasting, he should be lobbying for more government money so that its television and radio networks can worry less about finding corporate underwriters and focus more on providing the programming most Americans say they value and trust.