These are the news headlines as read on the June 10, 2005 edition of the mediageek radioshow: House Republicans Mounting Assaults on Public Broadcasting and Municipal Broadband; State Dept. Hack In Line for CPB CEO.
House Republicans are mounting assaults on public broadcasting and municipal wireless internet.
Rep. Pete Sessions, a Republican from Texas has introduced a bill that would let cable and telecom companies shut down municipal and community efforts to offer broadband services. According to the text of the ironically titled Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act of 2005, the bill would prevent any local or state government from offering “telecommunications, telecommunications service, information service, or cable service in any geographic area within the jurisdiction of such government in which a corporation or other private entity that is not affiliated with any State or local government is offering a substantially similar service.”
There are currently no co-signers to this bill.
On June 9 the House Appropriations subcommittee on labor, health and human services voted to sharply decrease federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with the goal of eliminating all funding within two years. The funding cut for the next fiscal year would be 25%, or $100 million of the CPBÂ’s current $400 million budget.
If passed, this cut would be the largest since the CPB was created by Congress in 1967.
In statement, Wisconsin Rep. David Obey, the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat said, “Americans overwhelmingly see public broadcasting as an unbiased information source. Perhaps that’s what the GOP finds so offensive about it. Republican leaders are trying to bring every facet of the federal government under their control… . Now they are trying to put their ideological stamp on public broadcasting.”
Programming on both PBS and NPR has come under fire in recent months from Kenneth Tomlinson, the Republican chairman of the CPB, who has pushed for what he calls greater “balance” on the public airwaves.
A spokeswoman for NPR directly blamed Tomlinson for the House subcommittee’s action, saying, “We’ve never been sure of Mr. Tomlinson’s intent but, with this news, we might be seeing his effect.”
Small public radio stations, particularly those in rural areas and those serving minority audiences, may be the most vulnerable to federal cuts because they currently operate on shoestring budgets.
The subcommitteeÂ’s action isnÂ’t final, and can be changed when appropriations go to the full House. The Senate is also less likely to approve of such massive cuts to public broadcasting.
State Dept. Hack In Line for CPB CEO
In a related story, a high-ranking official at the State Department in charge of adminstration propaganda who also was formerly a co-chairman of the Republican National Committee, is one of two candidates for the top job at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That official, Patricia de Stacy Harrison, is also the favored candidate of the CPB’s controversial chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson. Her candidacy is sparking new concerns among broadcasters about conservative influence over National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service programming.
Although the agency has hired a search firm to find other candidates for the job, the only other known candidate is Ken Ferree. Ferree, who has been CPB’s interim chief executive since April, was formerly the head of the FCC’s media bureau under Michael Powell, where he was a proponent of loosening media ownership rules.
The agency’s eight-member board — which is dominated by Republicans — is expected to decide on a new chief executive at the board’s next meeting, scheduled for June 20 and 21. In her State Department role, Harrison has praised the work of the department’s Office of Broadcasting Services, which in early 2002 began producing feature reports, some coordinated by the White House, that promoted the administration’s arguments for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The reports were distributed free to domestic and international TV stations. In testimony before Congress last year, Harrison said the Bush administration regarded these segments as “powerful strategic tools” for swaying public opinion.
In a letter to CPB’s board of directors last month, the board of Iowa Public Broadcasting wrote that hiring a “partisan political activist” as CPB president “would be in absolute contradiction to the concept of CPB as a buffer. It would call into question the motivations of everything we do, whether funded by CPB or not.”
The Iowa board’s letter was endorsed this past week by the Association of Public Television Stations.