Thank you for visiting Hands Off Public Broadcasting. We started this campaign to highlight the conservative activism of Kenneth Y. Tomlinson in his role as chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Tomlinson's actions had endangered the independence of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) and threatened the quality of their programming:

• He hired two ombudsmen, Ken Bode and William Schulz, both of whom have ties to conservative institutions and politicians.
• He hired Mary Catherine Andrews, the former director of the White House Office of Global Communications who wrote the guidelines for the ombudsman position while still at the White House, though Tomlinson now says this isn't true.
• Unbeknownst to other members of the CPB board, he spent $10,000 in taxpayer money to investigate alleged bias on the PBS program NOW, formerly hosted by Bill Moyers. Tomlinson has suggested the results confirm his belief that NOW's guest list is slanted to the left -- but he hasn't explicitly said so, and he hasn't publicly released the taxpayer-funded study.
• He helped raise $5 million to produce The Journal Editorial Report, a PBS program featuring the right-wing editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. (The program has since moved to Fox News.)

Our concerns turned out to be well-founded: An internal investigation into Tomlinson’s acts as chairman uncovered evidence suggesting that he had violated federal regulations as well as the organization's own regulations. This led to his resignation in November 2005 from the CPB board of directors; he had stepped down as CPB chairman in September 2005.

There is still much to do: NPR and PBS have recently given airtime to conservative misinformation. We need to encourage the producers and journalists responsible to do a better job and not give a platform to conservative falsehoods and other misinformation.

For other examples of conservative misinformation in the media, visit Media Matters for America.