As we reported last week, the two top Democrats on the House Appropriations and Commerce committees, Reps. David Obey and John Dingell, delivered a letter to the inspector general of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting charging CPB chief Kenneth Tomlinson with having broken the law in his quest to add “balance” to public broadcasting.
In the May 11 letter to CPB Inspector General Kenneth Konz, the pair wrote that “Recent news reports suggesting that the CPB is making personnel and funding decisions on the basis of political ideology are extremely troubling.” Speaking to the Web site Current.org, Konz has since confirmed that his office will investigate the charges contained in the letter and will report back to CPB and Congress once the investigation is completed.
One of the charges leveled by Obey and Dingell may point to potentially serious violations of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. The charge has to do with Tomlinson’s hiring of Mary Catherine Andrews, former director of the Office of Global Communications at the White House, to write a set of guidelines for CPB’s two new ombudsmen to use when monitoring political content on PBS. The problem with this is that Andrews was still on staff at the White House when she wrote the rules. This may violate Section 398 of the act, which bars federal employees from engaging in any “direction, supervision or control over public telecommunications.”
And this, again, brings us back to the further issue of Tomlinson being the chair of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, the panel that oversees all federally-sponsored broadcasting agencies, such as Voice of America. As almost all of the media coverage of the CPB case has failed to mention, in his role at the BBG, Tomlinson himself is a “federal employee” — yet he is explicitly trying to direct, shape, mold and supervise public telecommunications in his role at the CPB.
This, more than the Andrews appointment, should be front and center in this debate, as Tomlinson’s every move as head of the CPB may be, if we’re reading things correctly, in violation of the law.
We look forward to Konz’s report to Congress.
–Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.