Why Won’t CPB Open Up and Answer Funding Questions?

Howard Rosenberg got one thing right when he said the Senate debate over public broadcasting should be called “Tongues Untied” (“On the Urge to Purge Public TV,” Calendar, March 6). For years, the public broadcasting lobby has tried to rush their funding through Congress without any debate or discussion.

However, Rosenberg goes too far in saying senators who claim they want fairness “in truth seek to perform a lobotomy on a public medium.” For the first time, taxpayers are learning where the federal government is sending their hard-earned money.

More than $1 billion was supposed to have been wafted through to public broadcasting on a magic carpet. Blame it on the recession, perhaps, but if it weren’t for the courage of senators such as Bob Dole, John McCain, Robert Smith, and, yes, Jesse Helms, we wouldn’t know that millions are being given away without the minimal oversight and responsibility demanded of organizations as small as the United States Information Agency and as big as the Defense Department.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting rejects attempts to determine precisely how it is spending tax dollars. In fact, unlike the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, public broadcasting claims to be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

The CPB has stonewalled my requests for information--most recently, seeking contracts and historical minutes from 1985 to the present--since I first approached it in April, 1991, while researching “Masterpiece Theatre” for my UCLA dissertation. What has it got to hide? I know what kind of deals Bill Cosby makes from reading Variety, but I can’t find out about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Rosenberg makes light of charges of bias in PBS programming, but in doing so he shows contempt for the very law that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. It requires “objectivity” and “balance.” Any violation goes to the heart of the justification for the system. It is not only immoral and unethical, it is against the law.

Rosenberg also shows a contempt for democracy itself when he labels elected representatives responsible for the expenditure of tax dollars “myopic lawmakers.” What’s needed in the case of public television is more careful supervision, not negligence.

The senators have a fiduciary responsibility as well as legal oversight for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It is not, despite Rosenberg’s claim, an entitlement program for local television stations or film producers. It is, rather, a system intended to increase the educational and cultural resources available to the American people.

Rosenberg’s column ignores evidence that supports the claim that public broadcasting is in violation of the law and presenting biased public affairs programming. A study by Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs confirms the Republican contention that there is a leftward tilt at PBS.

Rosenberg also seemingly has turned a blind eye to the scandal-ridden Independent Television Service (ITVS). According to press reports, in 1988 Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) forced the CPB to funnel some $24 million to ITVS, a group that has been characterized in print as a “vanity press” for the “filmmaking wing” of the Democratic party.

Not surprisingly, four years later, not one minute of TV has been broadcast by the well-connected group. The only announced projects have titles like “Citizen Dhoruba” (about a Black Panther convicted of shooting policemen) and “Trail of Tears: The Ho Chi Minh Trail.” No similar grant of $24 million went to support conservative documentaries--or even to balanced middle-of-the-road shows.

If public television has been taken over by special interest groups promoting their own aims, if it is being used for partisan purposes or private profit, then the Senate has not only the right to act to clean up public television, but it also has the duty to do so swiftly and publicly. No tax dollars should be given to public television until it has made a full account of precisely how it has administered the billions of dollars in federal funding it has received.

Full disclosure was the only solution to the House banking mess and it is the only way to resolve the disputes over public broadcasting.