It seems that the former chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the now disgraced Kenneth Tomlinson, may have been up to something else beyond his now well-documented effort to swing public broadcasting to the right. In that campaign, Tomlinson took the CPB, which was created to be a firebreak against politicization of public media, and tried to turn it into a sort of Political Correctness Bureau to promote Bush administration policies and attempt to punish its critics.
It seem that, in addition to this bit of partisanship, Tomlinson may also have been busy pursuing that other favorite activity of the Republican power elite — funneling public money into private pockets. The details are outrageous enough — for instance, there’s a $400,000 severance package for one official carefully structured to avoid public disclosure. Now an audit has Tomlinson’s successors squirming. (Details from the Times are here.)
What strikes me, though, is how the whole scandal is a win/win sort of thing for the right, no matter how it turns out, since conservatives don’t really believe in the idea of public broadcasting anyway and would be happy to see it vanish in a puff of free-market dust. If Tomlinson’s meddling achieved its goal by slanting coverage, well, mission accomplished; if he got caught, that would just discredit the whole enterprise. If Republican appointees manage to reward their pals, great; if they get caught, well, gee, public broadcasting has become a sinkhole of corruption — let’s shut it down!
We are so deep into the universe of foxes staffing the henhouse that this stuff is almost making sense.
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