Hands Off NPR and PBS

Please consider signing this Common Cause petition (if you haven’t done so already) (Common Cause's msg has been edited for brevity). Thx! -- C.

------ Forwarded Message

At stake is our right to know the truth from sources who don't have to pay homage to the bottom line . . . . Just yesterday, we learned in the New York Times1 that the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), along with its chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, told its staff that it should redirect money for NPR away from national newscasts and public affairs programming towards music programs. . . .

Sign the Petition:

http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?ID=M68888737003843014274865

Tomlinson has decided that "Big Bird" leans left, despite evidence from two CPB-funded polls2 that suggest that an overwhelming number of Americans are happy with NPR and PBS programming. http://www.commoncause.org/ProtectPublicBroadcasting

Please sign our petition to protect NPR and PBS from partisan meddling and preserve what many Common Cause members consider to be a highly valued source of news and public affairs coverage:
http://www.commoncause.org/protectpublicbroadcasting ; http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?ID=M68888737003843014274865

[O]ver the past several months, Tomlinson and his Republican colleagues on the CPB have betrayed their duty to protect public broadcasting by:

Hiring Partisans. Tomlinson is pushing the CPB board to replace outgoing CPB President Katherine Cox with Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.3

Directly Seeking to Influence Programming Decisions. . . .

Working with the White House to sabotage efforts at reform. . . .

Targeting Journalists. Tomlinson hired a consultant to track the political ideology of guests on the PBS program NOW with Bill Moyers. The Moyers program was singled out without informing the public, members of the CPB Board, or Mr. Moyers.6

This past Sunday . . . . [Bill] Moyers . . . . said the following: [O]ne reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism.[…]
Those rules permit Washington officials to set the agenda … leaving the press to simply recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of . . . sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of spin invariably failing to provide . . . any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.7

Pls sign the petition:

http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?ID=M68888737003843014274865