A Different Reception For Public Broadcasting

· Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) took exception last year to a discussion of oil drilling in the state's Arctic wilderness during a three-part PBS documentary series called "Extreme Oil." The complaint led to an exchange of explanatory letters between CPB and PBS, and the controversy seems to have quieted. Stevens chairs the Senate committee that authorizes funds for CPB.

· Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), echoing long-standing complaints by a media watchdog group, expressed concerns about NPR's coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict in early 2003. Sherman felt the network's coverage was unfair to the Israeli government's point of view, according to a representative from his office. NPR agreed at the time to audit its reporting, but Sherman in November asked CPB to conduct its own review. So far, there's been no response from CPB, according to the congressman's office.

Tomlinson's background suggests a man who is competitive and driven, rather than combative and ideological. He and a sister were raised by their mother after his father died in a mill accident when Tomlinson was 5. After a brief stint as a reporter with the Richmond Times-Dispatch in the mid-1960s, Tomlinson joined the Reader's Digest and became its editor in chief by the age of 45, despite taking two years off in the early 1980s to run the Voice of America under President Ronald Reagan. He retired from the Digest at 52, intending to spend time on his Middleburg farm, where he raises thoroughbred racehorses.

Service on the CPB board is effectively a voluntary position, with board members' compensation capped at $10,000 a year. Records show that Tomlinson earned $6,112 last year.

Moyers's Message

Top officials at NPR and PBS are loath to criticize Tomlinson openly, given his position as chief advocate for federal support. In an interview, Mitchell, PBS president, spoke cordially of Tomlinson but defended Moyers's program, saying, "It reached out to a broad spectrum of people and points of view." (Moyers will reappear on PBS this summer in a new program called "Wide Angle.") As for Tomlinson's criticism of PBS as left-leaning, Mitchell says, "I regret that he feels that way, but I respectfully disagree with him and so does the public. Every survey that has been taken, including Mr. Tomlinson's, shows that the American public feels we are a fair and objective source of news and information."

For his part, Moyers -- a onetime press secretary to President Lyndon B. Johnson whose progressive views have sometimes made him a target of the right -- has much stronger words for Tomlinson. In a speech to a media conference in St. Louis on Sunday, Moyers compared Tomlinson to Richard Nixon, who perceived public broadcasting's news reporting as unfair in the early 1970s and tried to cut its federal funding.

"I always knew Nixon would be back," Moyers said, according to a news service account of his speech. "I just didn't know that this time he would ask to be chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting."

It's not clear how widely shared that sentiment is within the highly decentralized and largely autonomous public TV and radio system. But some station managers this week began internal discussions about reforming CPB to give stations greater say in their governance, according to sources.

One station manager, Bill Reed, president and CEO of KCPT-TV in Kansas City, Mo., late last week sent a letter to Tomlinson that was widely distributed among station managers. It said, in part, "For you and members of the CPB board to go on this sad, ridiculous witch hunt at a time when we should be standing together to make sure that public broadcasting is funded adequately is a betrayal of your responsibilities as a board member. You and those board members who support you should be sacked."

Tomlinson says his goal is to seek both liberal and conservative support for public broadcasting -- and thus more federal funding of it. Although he notes that "a lot of my friends are against [any] taxpayer support," he said he disagrees and is working "for the health of public broadcasting."

To ensure that, he added, "people in public broadcasting would be very wise to work on the perceptions that they leave."