Bill Moyer on Environmental Journalism and CPB
Bill Moyers recently delivered the keynote address at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists in Austin, TX. They have posted a transcript as well as a full-length mp3 of the speech. Perhaps I’ve had my head in the sand, but this segment of the speech on changes at Corporation for Public Broadcasting really caught me off guard. I’ll try to dig up some more references for this and post them below; meanwhile read on for an excerpt from Moyer’s speech…
My colleagues and I reported these stories again and again on my weekly PBS series, to the consternation of the President’s minions at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB Chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, turned the administration’s discomfort at embarrassing disclosures into a crusade to discredit our journalism. Tomlinson left the chairmanship this week but the Rightwing coup at public broadcasting is complete. He remains on the board under a new chair who is a former real estate director and Republican fund raiser. She recently told a Senate hearing that the CPB should have the authority to penalize public broadcasting journalists if they step out of line. Sitting beside her and Tomlinson on the board is another Bush appointee – also a partisan Republican activist – who was a charter member and chair of Newt Gingrich’s notorious political action committee, GOPAC. Reporting to them is the White House’s handpicked candidate to be President and chief executive officer of the CPB – a former cochair
of the Republican National Committee whose husband became PR director of the
Chemical Manufacturers Association after he had helped the pesticide industry smear Rachel Carson for her classic work on the environment, Silent Spring. Mark my words: if this gang has anything to say about it, there will be no challenging journalism to come from public television while they are around; no investigative reporting on the environment; no reporting at all on conflicts of interest between government and big business; no naming of names.
Shiver… –JA