A Man in Sesame Strife

Kenneth Y. Tomlinson’s tenure as chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been sponsored by the letter c, for controversy. In 2003 he became the head of the board, which oversees and funds public TV and radio. Since then, the Republican has fought what some conservatives consider PBS’s liberal bias and been accused of partisanship. PBS has had a string of culture-war flare-ups, including a spat over an episode of the kids’ program Postcards from Buster that featured two lesbian moms. Prominent Democrats last week called for Tomlinson’s resignation, while some House Republicans tried to slash the CPB’s funding by $100 million.

Tomlinson, 60, a former Reader’s Digest editor with a soft Appalachian drawl, tells TIME he had hoped to bring quiet change. “I worked for a year and a half inside the system to rectify” the bias issue, he says. Yet his moves–hiring a G.O.P. activist to monitor the political balance of the news show Now with Bill Moyers, bringing in CPB ombudsmen to police bias, shepherding the conservative Journal Editorial Report onto air–rankled some within and outside public broadcasting. John Lawson, president of the Association of Public Television Stations, says the problem is not the CPB’s bringing in conservative voices, since “balance is in their mandate.” But, he says, “what we will fight to the end is when CPB or anyone else starts telling producers or journalists how to report stories.”

Democrats too have questioned the propriety of those actions: the Now researcher was paid more than $14,000, and Tomlinson worked with a White House official to design the ombudsmen posts. But Tomlinson denies that he is advancing Republican interests. “Every time Bill Moyers goes on the air,” he says, “it helps [the G.O.P.] in the red states.”

Public TV fans cheered last week when the House rejected the proposed $100 million cut to the CPB’s budget. (About $102.5 million for kids’ programming and technical upgrades is still cut from the House budget, though the Senate may restore it.) But the political fight is sure to continue, especially after Tomlinson last week helped secure the election of former G.O.P. co-chair Patricia de Stacy Harrison as CPB president.

The CPB is charged with shielding public broadcasting from political interference. And Tomlinson, who was first named to the CPB board by President Clinton, says that has been exactly his intention. “We needed balance for the sake of public broadcasting,” he says, “so that Republicans and conservatives would take it more seriously.” His critics counter that he just wants to pressure it to lean right. Says Jeff Chester, executive director of the liberal Center for Digital Democracy: “The idea that a schedule filled with the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Antiques Roadshow, children’s programming and British mystery classics is a shrill liberal bastion is absurd.”

Whether PBS is skewed or not, the arguments over it have been. The debate about Moyers–a former Lyndon Johnson aide–obscures the fact that the host left Now in December. PBS’s defenders cast the funding fight as an attempt to kill Big Bird (Clifford, the big red dog, even attended a rally against budget cuts). Yet the biggest threat if funding dries up is not to such popular shows, which are valuable remunerative priorities, but to rural stations, which rely heavily on CPB funds, and to public-service shows that bring in less pledge money.

Indeed, what has been obscured by the bias tempest is that PBS has deeper problems than politics. Unlike public radio, which has grown its audience and landed huge bequests, PBS has been losing corporate sponsors, pledges and viewers in recent years. It still has excellent news, documentary and children’s programs, but kids have a slew of good choices–even commercial-free ones–on cable, and documentaries air from IFC to Cinemax. And PBS’s mostly risk-averse entertainment shows have long since surrendered the creative edge to Tony Soprano.

Ironically, Tomlinson may have helped PBS in an unintended way–by making people passionate about it again. Now the network just needs to figure out how to be exciting for something besides being attacked. –Reported by Mark Thompson/Washington