MOYERS ON TOMLINSON

There are so many Republican crooks running around loose that it's difficult to keep up with all the stories. And hard to image it was just a couple weeks ago that Kenneth Y. Tomlinson was roasting in his moment of infamy after being kicked off the Board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I'm sure he's been very relieved every time someone brought up DeLay and Abramoff and Scanlon and Frist and Ney and Noe and Burns and even his close friend and benefactor Rove, and Libby and every Republicrook hittin' the headlines lately. And today... Cunningham pleading guilty to conspiracy, to taking millions of dollars in bribes, to tax evasion, etc and then breaking down and crying like a little girl on TV... well... who's gonna care that Kenneth Y. Tomlinson was caught wrecking the country's public broadcast system?

Well... Bill Moyers was interviewed by John Eggerton in BROADCASTING & CABLE today-- and he had plenty to say about Rove's sinister but slovenly-looking Goebbels. And Bill wasn't pulling any punches! In response to a question about Tomlinson having charged that Moyers-- one of the most, if not the most, revered broadcast journalists in the country-- was "liberally biased," Moyers correctly pointed out that "right-wing partisans like Tomlinson have always attacked aggressive reporting as liberal. We were biased, all right— in favor of uncovering the news that powerful people wanted to keep hidden: conflicts of interest at the Department of Interior, secret meetings between Vice President Cheney and the oil industry, backdoor shenanigans by lobbyists at the FCC, corruption in Congress, neglect of wounded veterans returning from Iraq, Pentagon cost overruns, the manipulation of intelligence leading to the invasion of Iraq. We were way ahead of the news curve on these stories, and the administration turned its hit men loose on us. Tomlinson actually told THE WASHINGTON POST that he was irate over one of our documentary reports from a small town in Pennsylvania hard-hit by outsourcing. If reporting on what's happening to ordinary people thrown overboard by circumstances beyond their control and betrayed by Washington officials is liberalism, I stand convicted. It is an old canard of right-wing ideologues like Tomlinson to equate tough journalism with liberalism. They hope to distract people from the message by trying to discredit the messenger. NOW threw the fear of God into Tomlinson's crowd because they couldn't dispute the accuracy of our reporting."

Moyers also talks about Tomlinson threatening to de-fund PBS if they didn't "deal" with Moyers and about how Tomlinson repeatedly refused to debate him as he scurried around in the dark, reporting only to KKKarl Rove and busy as a beaver wrecking a great institution by populating it with Republican political hacks and cronies ala that freak Bush installed at FEMA who oversaw the destruction of New Orleans.