Posted 6:42 AM by Scoobie Davis

Joe Conason on the PBS Sham
Read the whole article.

Conservatives have long warned us that someday the commissars of political correctness are going to take over in Washington and impose their opinions on us with our own tax dollars. What they didn’t tell us is that they would become those commissars, and that their politically correct orthodoxy would be the Republican Party line—as they are now proving at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

With all the subtlety of an old-style Soviet bureaucrat, C.P.B. chairman Kenneth Tomlinson is extending partisan political control over public television. As a former Reader’s Digest editor and Republican appointee, Mr. Tomlinson clearly understands what he was appointed to do.

Several weeks ago, he hired a Bush White House communications flack named Mary Catherine Andrews. She quickly set up a new “office of the ombudsman” that will oversee the content of public TV and radio broadcasts. Ms. Andrews was so eager to get to work that she began while still under the watchful eye of Karl Rove, the President’s chief political advisor and a pal of Mr. Tomlinson.

According to The New York Times, Ms. Andrews “helped draft the office’s guiding principles, set up a Web page and prepared a news release about the appointment of the [two] new ombudsmen,” whom she apparently helped to select.

One of the ombudsmen is a former Reader’s Digest editor known for his conservative Republicanism, while the other is a retired TV correspondent who endorsed the G.O.P. candidate for governor of Indiana last year and holds a fellowship at the right-wing Hudson Institute. That is how the Bush administration proposes to ensure “objective and balanced” broadcasting.