PBS Kids

From Investors Business Daily:

More evidence of how far we've gotten away from the Constitution-based Government spending model. No one is saying that PBS should not exist, just that it should exist in the free, public market without subsidization from our federal tax dollars.

Posted 11/16/2005
Media: So the former chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is accused of breaking the law by politicizing the system. Well, for those who don't want politics in the CPB, we have a solution: stop funding it.

That's right: Let public television and radio, which suck up taxpayer dollars doled out by the CPB, stand on their own.

Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the former chairman at the center of the probe, is a Republican. Already a member of the CPB board, he was given the gavel by President Bush. He saw it as his job to bring needed balance to the programming on public television, which has always listed to the port side. But his modest efforts put him on the bad side of Kenneth A. Konz, CPB inspector general.

Konz's 67-page report puts Tomlinson squarely in the role of a public enemy. It charges him with interfering in programming, being "motivated by political considerations" from the White House and breaking federal law when he tried to hire Patricia Harrison, a former Republican Party co-chairwoman who was appointed to the CPB board anyway.

The hiring attempt, Konz concluded, violated the Federal Broadcasting Act, which bans the use of political tests in employment.

This is all so . . . Orwellian. That Tomlinson is accused of political interference with programming for merely trying to inject some reasonable balance is absurd — at least to anyone who doesn't believe that left-of-center values and ideology are the natural order of things. His critics have a lot of brass accusing him of bias.

The attack on Tomlinson is no surprise, though. The left that so adores and dominates public TV and radio has been after his head for some time. It was President Clinton who appointed him to the CPB board, and Democrats put up with him until after he became chairman in 2003. But setting out to right a wrong proved to be too much.

This would not be an issue, and Tomlinson could have remained on his Virginia farm raising his beloved thoroughbred horses, if Congress had zeroed out the CPB as a budget item years ago. There's no constitutional authority for it to exist. Nor is it a legitimate function of a government in a free society.

Any talk of defunding the CPB — an unlikely event — would invariably bring shrieks about Big Bird being put on the endangered species list and the curtain coming down on Masterpiece Theater. Ignore them. In a market environment, the best that public television and radio have to offer can stand on its own.

As for the elitist — and too often blatantly biased — news broadcasts on both TV and radio, they could be bounced like a bad sitcom with abysmal ratings. Last time we looked, there was no shortage of media outlets for Democratic talking points.

All things considered (to borrow a phrase), defunding the CPB is the best way to go.