PUBLIC TV GETS A BREAK

The Maine Public Broadcasting Network remains in trouble despite the reprieve in the House this week. The least of its problems is at the state level. The Maine Legislature cut its appropriation by $39,000 as part of its effort to correct the state’s out-of-balance budget. The network’s president and CEO, Mary Anne Alhadeff, says she can live with that, even though the cut will reduce state support to about its level when a merger formed the network in 1992.

It is the threatened federal cuts that make things really tough for Maine’s public television and public radio service. Though the House voted Thursday to restore $100 million cut by its Appropriations Committee, the Senate has yet to include the money in its budget. Should the cut stand, it would rescind 25 percent of the previously approved $400 million for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; eliminate federal funding for the Ready to Learn initiative, which helps fund popular TV shows like “Arthur,” “Sesame Street” and “Clifford”; eliminate funds for the conversion of radio and television signals from analog to digital, a change mandated by the federal government; and eliminate funds for satellite connections that feed national programs to public television stations.

Ms. Alhadeff says congressional approval of the cuts would have a devastating impact and would require drastic reductions in both national and local programs of Maine’s public radio and television stations. She has been asking the network’s trustees and members of the broadcast audience to get in touch with Maine’s representatives and senators, but, with a dash of caution, merely to express their opinions about the pending bill.

She is cautious, too, in withholding public comment on a rising controversy over the behavior and background of the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson. Advocating what he calls “balance” in public broadcasting’s news programs, he has repeatedly attacked Bill Moyers, who anchored the “Now” show until last year as a prime example of liberal bias. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Mr. Tomlinson had secretly retained a researcher to monitor the “Now” program who had worked for 20 years at conservative journalism center. The corporation’s inspector general is looking into Mr. Tomlinson’s decision to pay the researcher, Fred Mann, $14,170 without the knowledge of the corporation’s board

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said last week that Mr. Mann’s research included the information that one episode of “Now” called Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, a “liberal” because he questioned the White House policy on Iraq. Mr. Mann criticized another “Now” program as “anti-defense” because it discussed financial waste at the Pentagon.

Mr. Tomlinson was also successful in promoting Patricia Harrison, an assistant secretary of state and a former co-chairman of Republican National Committee, to the presidency of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

All this at the organization that was created to form a wall between government and public broadcasting and guarantee its independence. The nation is in a serious fix when fund cuts and political maneuvering threaten to weaken and corrupt our independent public source of news, education and entertainment.