-Caveat Lector- Failing the "Perception Test" <http://www.MediaTransparency.org/stories/bos.htm> PBS routinely ignores its own rules in allowing conservative/Republican propagandists surreptitious, unacknowledged access to its network This article reprinted with the permission of Current, where it first appeared in June, 2001. by Jerry M. Landay WASHINGTON, DC, JUNE, 2001-- THERE'S A SYSTEM FAILURE AT PBS. The network routinely ignores its own underwriting guidelines, distributing programs marked by singularly close ties among conservative funders, producers, interview participants and political content. In the deal, conservative foundations gain access to the public air to showcase their own beneficiaries, push narrow ideological agendas, influence public opinion and move public policy to the right. They get help from CPB and PBS, which have co-funded partisan conservative offerings. Corporately funded fare is welcome, but bids for public-affairs airtime by independent producers and advocates perceived as too "liberal" are not. The NPR political commentary roster also has reflected substantial editorial influence by the organized right. A commotion in 1999 provides an illustrative comparison. Newspapers reported a lapse by Bill Moyers in his PBS documentary on campaign reform, "Free Speech for Sale." Three interview participants had links with public-interest groups that received grants from the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, which has Moyers as president. Usually scrupulous about separating his grantmaking from his journalism, he confessed to the oversight. It hadn't "crossed my mind," Moyers admitted. "It should have occurred to me to identify [this]. Next time, I'll be sure to do so." "More evidence," the Wall Street Journal intoned, "of the need for PBS to feature a warning label about bias." That would be a grand idea, if "bias" labels were imposed and administered evenhandedly. The conservative movement barraged Moyers over his mistake. Under the headline "Journalism or Favoritism," FreeRepublic.com, a self-described "Conservative News Forum," complained that Moyers uses "his control over money and media to influence public policy." Prof. David L. Schaefer, a political scientist at College of the Holy Cross who has written on the matter for the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, also questioned the links between the Schumann Foundation and TomPaine.com, the web site of news and opinion edited by Moyers' son John. "The ethical conflict-of-interest tangle grows," Schaefer wrote. Let's compare this "tangle" with the conservative movement's orchestrated campaign of meshing money with organizations, agendas and personalities that influence public opinion and policy. The Claremont Institute, as it happens, is just one cog in this integrated constellation of activist groups amply funded by three major foundations (with assists from a handful of less-known benefactors)--the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, the John M. Olin Foundation of New York, and the Scaife family foundations of Pittsburgh. I'll call them "BOS" for short. The treasuries of BOS essentially have underwritten the rise of movement conservatism since the early '80sin part by providing millions in coordinated grants to shape media content. BOS-funded programs on PBS regularly showcase conservative panelists, hosts and interviewees who are also beneficiaries of BOS funding. The connections are unacknowledged. Unlike Moyers' single slip, the conflict of interest by conservative funders and producers is ongoing. Does PBS follow the money? "I don't know," senior programmer John Wilson told me. "I don't really track it that way." The "perception test" is the cornerstone of PBS's underwriting guidelines: public television "must reinforce the accurate perception that it is a free and independent institution." To protect its journalistic integrity, the system is supposed to screen public-affairs funders by asking: "Has the underwriter exercised editorial control? Might the public perceive that the underwriter has exercised editorial control?" As a routine matter, BOS-funded productions fail to meet the perception test. An informal scan through PBS public-affairs offerings from 1992 to the present turns up at least 17 instances in which a single program or continuing series underwritten or co-funded by BOS served as a platform for the views of BOS grantees and their organizations. There were no "warning labels about bias." CPB used taxpayers' money to co-fund 10 of them with PBS. On public radio, meanwhile, NPR frequently airs contributions from political commentators with close ideological ties to BOS. Their organizational links to BOS-funded objectives are similarly unacknowledged. Conservative involvement in media is widespread, relentlessly focused and intense. It is dedicated to the tenet that ideas have consequences. Under BOS patronage, these consequences have powered the gradual shift of American power rightward since the 1980s. But should the movement be able to enlist public broadcasting to that end? And if truth in labeling is demanded of Moyers, shouldn't the same truth-in-packaging standard hold for everyone? Case in point about "tangles": In March 2000, a conservative West Coast talk-show host, Larry Elder, anchored an episode of the National Desk series: "Education - A Public Right Gone Wrong." The title telegraphed the tilt. Clint Bolick, a conservative litigator for the Institute for Justice and Daniel McGroarty of the Institute for Contemporary Studies joined in trashing teachers' unions and advocating privatized education and school vouchers. Both institutes receive grants from BOS, which was also a series co-funder with PBS and CPB. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that a promised debate was "no debate at all." Its researches revealed that 38 of the program's 42 on-air interviewees supported the premise that education should be "redirected" from public to private schools. Many of them had BOS connections. The Bradley Foundation has put school vouchers on the national agenda, in part by funding and actively promoting a "model" voucher program in Milwaukee. Through Whidbey Island Films, BOS provided at least $1,175,000 in funding for National Desk between 1995 and 1999. Why did these multiple conflicts of interest get PBS's approval, plus co-funding? (Funding data in this article were obtained from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and the website MediaTransparency.org. The latter has catalogued and cross-indexed 15 years of grants from a dozen conservative foundations. Amounts given may not include all grants actually received.) National Desk and its predecessor series Reverse Angle had a lot of help finding a place in public TV. One of its prime movers, according to a well-placed source in public TV, was David Horowitz, founder and director of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), who made an art of attacking public broadcasting and obtaining air time from it. He hammered away at public TV for many months in the mid- '90s, arguing for more conservative programming, developing much of the rhetoric used by Newt Gingrich and Larry Pressler in their zero-it-out campaign against CPB, and publishing his attacks in his contentious little magazine called Comint. A consultant to National Desk who recently regained the spotlight by campaigning against slavery reparations for African-Americans, Horowitz already had saved Elder's job as a Los Angeles radio talk show host. (Horowitz has described Elder as "an outspoken opponent of . . . the welfare state"). Since 1989, BOS has been CSPC's principal funding source, providing more than $9 million. The series is in hiatus, but co-producer Lionel Chetwyn, a successful maker of made-for-TV movies, is working on replacements. Chetwynd was identified by the Los Angeles Daily Journal as co-founder with Horowitz of the Wednesday Morning Club, a discussion series in the film and entertainment community that "seeks to bridge the gap between Hollywood and Washington." It's larded heavily with conservative guests. The 16 programs of National Desk between 1997 and 2000 made it a classic example of the failure of the PBS perception test. An episode in June 2000, "Urbanism, Suburbanism and the Good Life," defended urban sprawl. It took a largely one-sided, pro-development, anti-regulatory stand, invoking conservative mantras of "self-determination" and the wisdom of "market forces" in influencing where families live. Four participants belonged to conservative policy organizations or think tanks, of which three received BOS support; the fourth got funding from a smaller allied foundation. Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.), the primus magister over federal aid to public broadcasting and a Wednesday Club guest, said he remained "hopeful that the good intentions of PBS programmers will insure that a suitable replacement [for National Desk] is included in future PBS schedules." It doesn't take a political scientist to divine the intent. Tauzin has made it clear that congressional Republicans consider such programs the asking price for the lives of the reportorial Frontline and P.O.V. The offenses to probity continue. For eight years, PBS has carried the weekly series Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg, plus associated public-affairs specials. Wattenberg's producers package the conservative agenda into their offerings, with occasional forays into the arts. Think Tank frequently uses experts connected to BOS-funded advocacy organizations. The series received at least $1.6 million from Bradley and Olin between 1993 and 1999, through the Educational Broadcasting Corp. and the New River Education Fund. Wattenberg is a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute. It received some $23 million from BOS between 1985 and 1999. Wattenberg's program "What Is Ronald Reagan's Legacy?," offered to stations on April 1, featured fellows of the Hoover Institution, recipient of generous grants from BOS. Later in April, the program examined President Bush's controversial plan for "faith-based" federal support of social programs through churches. The liberal-minded Wendy Kaminer, affiliated scholar with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, confronted conservatives Michael Horowitz, director of the Project for International Religious Liberty at the Hudson Institute, and Joseph Loconte, William E. Simon Fellow on Religion and a Free Society at the Heritage Foundation. Hudson has received some $9 million from BOS since 1987. The Heritage Foundation took more than $35 million from BOS between 1985 and 1999. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting called Heritage the "media's favorite think-tank," because its fellows so frequently appear in news stories, talk shows, TV news, and discussion panels, such as Jim Lehrer's NewsHour. The other evening, Heritage's Loconte materialized on NPR's All Things Considered as a commentator. He promoted a best-selling book about the Biblical figure Jabez, untainted by "moral ruin," which, he said, helped explain its success in "the post-Clinton era." Clinton-bashing for strategic purposes remains an enduring theme of conservative NPR commentators. Last December, regular Morning Edition commentator David Frum suggested darkly that we can anticipate scandal from Sen. Hillary Clinton, because she "wouldn't tell New York how she'd vote on highway bills" A few months later, Frum's wife, anti-feminist writer Danielle Crittenden, described Mrs. Clinton as a flashy "rebel" who "left very little substance behind." By comparison, she hyperbolized, Mrs. Bush's "dullness "is a good thing." What might Eric Sevareid have said about such agenda stuff? In his final appearance on CBS News in 1977, the commentator defined his task as one of journalistic illumination: "Our business [is] to find out what is going on, under the surface and beyond the horizon." But BOS-based commentators tend to favor polemics over journalistic enlightenment. Moral relativity abounds. Commentator Merrill Matthews, a fellow in the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), argued that providing affordable AIDS cocktails to the 27 million HIV-positives of sub-Saharan Africa would unbearably strain American drug companies. "They're not all that profitable, compared to many other companies," he argued. In February, occasional commentator L. Brent Bozell, whose appointed mission, like Horowitz's, is to eradicate progressivism in the press wherever he conveniently perceives it, disinterred the fusty bromide about "liberal bias" to complain "the news media" habitually promotes abortion. Bozell, who once told the Washington Times that "there's no longer any need for" public broadcasting, is happy to exploit the system to get his message out to listeners. All benefit from the BOS gravy train. Bozell is chairman of the Media Research Center, which received at least $835,000 in BOS funding since 1990. Matthews' IPI has received at least $1 million from BOS since 1990. David Frum is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research of New York City, a conservative think tank, which has received some $8 million from BOS since 1985 (Frum departed the NPR commentary roster early January). Meanwhile, back at PBS, between 1992 and 1999, William Buckley's Firing Line received at least $2,325,000 from Olin and Bradley. Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan is an Olin beneficiary (along with taxpayers' money from CPB). Scaife co-funds Adventures from the Book of Virtues, based on the book by William Bennett, a former Republican education secretary and drug "czar," who is a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation. There should be no illusions about the hard-wired connection between BOS money, program content, and Republican conservatism. Of course, conservative views must be heard. But liberal voices aren't accorded the same leave or license. The pusillanimous swiveling of the PBS logo profile during the Reagan '80s from looking left to pointing right proved a harbinger. A producer of PBS programs today told me: "Conservative foundations and think-tanks become much more purposeful in their synergies and their strategies. And mainstream funders no longer underwrite old-line, traditional journalistic documentaries. The net effect is a real tilt going to the right." Commercial media polarize political thinking into an artificial culture war between right and center, with the left left out. Public broadcasting embraces the same construct. A review of the news on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday by conservative Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard and journalist Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times, "passes" as the balanced "conversation of democracy," an observer pointed out. There is no liberal counterpart to Wattenberg or his series format, say, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, hosting a discussion on welfare reform, corporate welfare, and economic decline, underwritten by People for the American Way. If we must have corporate radical Merrill Matthews as an NPR commentator, then why not, dare I name him, Noam Chomsky? Public broadcasting's illiberality is part of a general rightward skew of the media. The tilt derives from BOS's success, as well as American economic exceptionalism, concentration of media ownership, fear of liberal "taint," the shallowness of corporate journalism, and the ruling class status of the Washington press corps. According to a study for FAIR by scholar David Croteau of Virginia Commonwealth University, the press corp is more conservative on socioeconomic issues than the general public. On Feb. 28, the day after President Bush's budget message to Congress, I attended a Washington policy conference sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future, a liberal think tank. Thoughtful American leaders, hardly "fringers," offered timely analyses of the Presidential speech as harbinger of a surprisingly ultra-conservative agenda. In the past, editors would have considered the event a gold mine of responsible, critical comment from the loyal opposition: AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, Sens. Dick Durbin and Paul Wellstone, NAACP Board Chair Julian Bond, environmentalist Carl Pope and Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., among others. It was held at pressdom's very heart, the National Press Club, in a building stacked with the bureaus of leading American journals. A lone reporter from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune signed in. Serious accounts appeared only in the Chicago Tribune and New York Magazine. No New York Times or Washington Post. No network news. No C-SPAN. A journalist from Hungarian Radio thought to attend. But no NPR, even though it had provided coverage of the Conservative Political Action Congress days earlier. As with their advertiser-supported brethren, NPR and PBS seem ultra-sensitive to conservative agitprop about "liberal bias," intent on demonstrating their dis-liberal set. The climate breeds caution. Seven sources for this article asked for anonymity. "Over the years," one acknowledged, "we've been an insecure institution, always having to beg, having to avoid ruffling feathers. This is a huge problem." A Washington editor has surmised that public broadcasting as an institution has soaked in the institutional herd view of the mainstream press that liberalism is powerless, ineffectual, without a constituency, not worth troubling about. It isn't taken seriously, he said, while "radicalism on the right is in; liberalism is out." Besides, the liberal tag has acquired linguistic taint that sticks. In his 1988 campaign, George Bush the Elder employed media rhetoric to convert "liberal" into the pejorative "L word," meaning "Extreme! Do not touch!" "Conservatives altered the language," a television educator said. "You can't use the word 'liberal' now, even as in a 'liberal arts' sense, without poisoning the thing, like "intellectual" during the McCarthy period." I encountered the problem after my article on the Federalist Society appeared in the March 2000 issue of Washington Monthly. The Society is a national confederation of conservative attorneys and law students that serves as think tank on legal theory for conservative litigation groups that have rolled back settled law on federal power, social services, individual rights and affirmative action. Kenneth Starr is a Federalist. Members provided legal talent for Paula Jones and the Clinton impeachment. A producer for Brian Lehrer's WNYC talk show On the Line phoned to ask if I could suggest someone from the Federalist Society to discuss my article. What about the author, who spent four months researching and writing the piece? She replied that the station was under attack for being "too liberal," and offed me. The executive director of the Society, Eugene Meyer, appeared, to dismiss my work as of "left-wing origin." Lehrer called it "over the top." I had no right of reply. Ironically, Lehrer, as host of On the Media, was then public radio's most prominent monitor of the press. [WNYC declined to comment on this incident.] A former public broadcaster commented: "There are pressures from station boards, there's inside pressure from development officers, who represent corporate America, there's congressional pressure, and finally, there's enormous self-censorship, because you have to raise money for your programming." The Bradley, Olin and Scaife family foundations comprehend the link between money, power and media. The mainstream and progressive foundations, Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Kellogg, MacArthur and Soros, have more combined capital. But they've retreated from funding serious examinations of social issues on the air, giving BOS an open field. The conservative foundations move, says the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy, "to expand opportunities for airing conservative viewpoints" while progressive access narrows. Trudy Lieberman of Columbia Journalism Review tracks the right's coordinated use of media influence in Slanting the Story: The Forces that Shape the News (New Press). BOS, she says, advances a "specific, narrow" agenda. Its coordinated throw-weight is enormous. She writes, "the right wing has come to dominate public policy debates" through "aggressive strategies" to affect media treatment of political and economic issues. They are "shaping American thinking." The press rarely reports on BOS activities. BOS, with its lesser counterparts, operates through an amply-funded, tightly coordinated universe of think tanks, policy institutes, litigation groups, publications, judicial seminars and scholars, including six outfits that specialize in keeping the media politically in line, among them, Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media, Horowitz's CSPC, and Bozell's Media Research Center. Former Clinton senior aide Sidney Blumenthal, author of The Rise of the Counter Establishment, a classic study of movement conservatism, told me the conservatives' strategy is "to identify the mainstream media with the ideological left" to provide "movement conservatism [with] more coverage and more space," while shielding the ultimate source. Trudy Lieberman posits her own perception test: "Does the public know where the ideas come from and who pays to put them on the agenda?" It's true that many people don't question the sources of the ideas they imbibe. The important thing, movement conservatives believe, is that they come to agree with them. Public broadcasting's paramount achievement may be that it has survived the long night of Nixon-Buchanan-Gingrich-Pressler-Tauzin. But, the price is an editorial double standard that virtually ignores major blocs of American opinion. PBS viewers can't regularly see provocative documentaries that challenge the status quo, as honest journalism must. Independent producer-journalists confront an array of rejections from PBS officials, because "human rights is an insufficient organizing principle for a series," because "stories with a foreign element no longer fly," because "it's funded by organized labor," or because station gatekeepers tell producers there's simply no point trying. But public broadcasting was chartered to offer a rainbow of ideas, a principle vital to its integrity and health. To protect and defend that mission, in the short run, PBS should either suspend the "perception test" or apply it evenhandedly. In the long term, the system's independence depends on its eventual depoliticization, its perpetual insulation from power merchants who view it as a political tool. Public broadcasting is not an instrument of political parties or ideologies. It should reflect the totality of American political thought. What's needed is a united campaign by a new Carnegie Commission of truly independent citizens to liberate the system with a self-generating trust fund, and to mobilize public opinion to demand it. "Balance and objectivity," a political bludgeon, must be replaced with the guiding principle of representative access, for more journalistic contributors who report the world as it is; for a wider range of opinions and views about how the world works and ought to work. This is a task for stout hearts. The mainstream foundations that sired public broadcasting must reverse course and actively promote and defend its role as telemedia's open marketplace of ideas. The proposed new series Public Square for 2002 offers a major funding opportunity for the foundations that have not been much involved in national programming lately. NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin concedes that the network "can do better," by providing "a range of opinion" among political commentators, and "by identifying whom these people work for." As memberships lag at public TV stations, Bill Moyers recently proferred a rare lesson in audience-building. His well-documented report on the chemical industry attracted some 6 million viewers. For years, investigator-journalists in the Moyers mold have been demanding regular access to the public air. More controversy, perhaps? Why not? Part of public broadcasting's mission is to maintain an open line to all parts of the political culture. To cut off its liberal roots is to deny the system the very sustenance that gave it life. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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