Washington – The Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is aggressively pressing public television to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias, prompting some public broadcasting leaders – including the chief executive of PBS – to object that his actions pose a threat to editorial independence.
Without the knowledge of his board, chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, who has close ties to presidential adviser Karl Rove, contracted last year with an outside consultant to keep track of the guests’ political leanings on one program, “Now With Bill Moyers.”
In late March, on the recommendation of administration officials, Tomlinson hired the director of the White House Office of Global Communications as a senior staff member, corporation officials said.
While she was still on the White House staff, she helped draft guidelines governing the work of two ombudsmen whom the corporation recently appointed to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts.
Tomlinson also encouraged corporation and public broadcasting officials to broadcast “The Journal Editorial Report,” whose host, Paul Gigot, editor of the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, is his friend.
And while a search firm has been retained to find a successor for Kathleen Cox, the corporation’s president and chief executive, whose contract was not renewed last month, Tomlinson has made clear to the board that his choice is Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee who is now an assistant secretary of state.
Pat Mitchell, the president and chief executive of PBS, was critical of Tomlinson, with whom she has sparred in private but had stopped short of challenging publicly.
“I believe there has been no chilling effect, but I do think there have been instances of attempts to influence content from a political perspective that I do not consider appropriate,” Mitchell said in an interview Friday.