"Right-wing partisans like Tomlinson have always attacked aggressive reporting as liberal." So says Bill Moyers about former Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson. Now that the CPB Inspector General's report has concluded that Tomlinson violated the law in his attempts to "re-balance" public broadcasting, Moyers is talking. In the interview today with
Broadcasting & Cable, Moyers responds to the question of whether or not his show, NOW, was biased:
We were biased, all right--in favor of uncovering the news that powerful people wanted to keep hidden: conflicts of interest at the Department of Interior, secret meetings between Vice President Cheney and the oil industry, backdoor shenanigans by lobbyists at the FCC, corruption in Congress, neglect of wounded veterans returning from Iraq, Pentagon cost overruns, the manipulation of intelligence leading to the invasion of Iraq.
We were way ahead of the news curve on these stories, and the administration turned its hit men loose on us.
I've heard Moyers in the past say that the only thing that the right-wing hates more than liberals is the truth. And clearly Moyers' commitment to telling the truth is what brought the hounds after him.
I am also wondering if Tomlinson was chosen by Karl Rove to be Chairman of the CPB as a part of the great Traitorgate/Wilson/Rove scandal. The evidence is so far circumstantial but compelling to those of us who are never surprised by the lengths to which Karl Rove will go.
Let's look at what we know: Moyers interviewed Joe Wilson on the eve of the Iraq invasion in February of 2003. Wilson clearly thought that disarmament could be achieved by what he called "muscular disarmament and coercive inspections" rather than all-out war. He also states quite clearly that he believes that Bush would not be satisfied with disarmament; he said that Bush "wants a dead Hussein."
Later, in a response to a question by Moyers about why Bush wants the war, Wilson lets a very big cat out of the bag. He says, "it's far more about re-growing the political map of the Middle East." He then went on to talk about Richard Perle and a study called "Clean Break" that Perle did for the Likud Israeli government in the mid-90's about securing Israeli security through changing Mid-East regimes starting with Iraq and moving on to Syria and Iran. This study is just now starting to surface in the liberal blogosphere and it is quite controversial, implying as it does that the neo-con agenda that has been forced on the U.S. was linked closely to the Likud agenda.
So, with this appearance on NOW with Bill Moyers on Feb. 28, 2003, Joe Wilson arrives on the White House radar screen. Tomlinson was appointed as chairman of the CPB Board by President Bush in September 2003, about the right time-lag to get anything done in Washington. His primary target during his two-year reign at CPB was Bill Moyers.
Lastly, there are a large number of emails between Tomlinson and Karl Rove before and at the beginning of Tomlinson's reign that the still Republican-dominated CPB Board will not release.
I'm betting that we will see that Tomlinson's appointment to the Chairmanship of the CPB Board and the subsequent attacks on Moyers and the liberal bias of PBS was done as a direct result of Moyers' interview of Joe Wilson before the war.