More on PBS

Joe Conason writes in his New York Observer column:

It is in Mr. Tomlinson’s engineering of top appointments, however, that his urge to mimic the Soviet style approaches parody. Having ousted the former C.P.B. president, whose ideological leanings were deemed suspicious, he replaced her with Ken Ferree, yet another Republican placeholder. But Mr. Ferree is merely an interim appointee, soon to be replaced by Patricia Harrison—a State Department official and former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.

No, that isn’t a misprint. Led by Mr. Rove, the Republican commissars are placing the C.P.B., with executive authority and $400 million in federal funding, under the control of a former party leader. Imagine the horrified screaming from the right if, as President, Bill Clinton had dared choose a former Democratic Party chair to oversee public broadcasting. Every right-thinking pundit and politician would howl for the immediate and total defunding of C.P.B. and the appointment of a special prosecutor, while making nasty comparisons with Soviet Russia.

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Now, despite all their phony complaining about liberal bias and federal waste, the Republicans appear eager to spread still more of their own subsidized propaganda. Thanks to Mr. Tomlinson, PBS viewers will now be treated to The Wall Street Journal Editorial Report, a program devoted to scintillating discussion among the ideologues responsible for that newspaper’s ultra-right editorial page. The taxpayers will pay to distribute their program, which was a resounding failure on commercial cable, in an arrangement The Journal’s editorialists would surely denounce as scandalous if only it didn’t benefit them.

No English word is adequate to describe this kind of hypocrisy.

The true test of these White House incursions will take place in the public-television marketplace, where ordinary citizens give or withhold their support. The time may be coming when they decide that their money can be spent on better things than another megaphone for Mr. Rove.

Of course, as someone pointed out (and I don't remember where I read this), the repugs win either way. Either people stop giving to PBS and it withers away, or PBS becomes the latest right wing mouthpiece on the public airwaves.

My brain hurts.