May 16, 2005

Bill Moyers blasts Public Broadcasting chairman
"Kennyboy Tomlinson is a fucking ass-boy for the misadministration," Moyers should have said.

In a speech before 1,400 media activists, television journalist Bill Moyers lambasted Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), for hijacking public broadcasting to serve a partisan agenda.

"I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House," Moyers told a packed room at the National Conference for Media Reform. "And that's what Kenneth Tomlinson has been doing."

Tomlinson, a staunch Republican, has launched a personal crusade aimed at "eliminating the perception of political bias" in PBS programs. He has covertly promoted right-wing programming and tried to install his political allies to CPB's board and executive offices. He even contracted an outside consultant to monitor Moyers' weekly PBS news program, "NOW with Bill Moyers," for signs of liberal bias.

"The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party gets," Moyers said. "That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth."

Even scarier, a new survey published today shows that 22% of the 'merican public think the government should be allowed to censor the press.


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