Linkmeister

Fun with Tomlinson

When last we left Ken Tomlinson, the chairman of CPB, he was fibbing about coordinating his efforts to swing PBS and NPR towards Republican talking points with the White House. He had commissioned a secret report which attempted to rank stories which ran on the two media outlets according to their political leanings. The Mann report (links to it here) is now available, and it makes for some really weird reading. Max Blumenthal has done some analysis.

The Mann report reads as if dictated by Cookie Monster while chewing on a mouthful of lead paint chips. Names of famous political figures and celebrities are chronically misspelled. PBS guests are categorized by labels--"anti-DeLay," "neutral," "x"--for often bewildering reasons. Mann appears to have spent endless hours monitoring programs with no political content, gathering such insights as that Ray Charles was blind.

I suggest you read the report yourself. The overview is here (pdf). There's even a copy of the nifty chart Mann prepared to identify guests on "Now with Bill Moyers" as liberal, conservative, anti-Bush, etc. Chuck Hagel and other Republicans were no doubt surprised to learn they were "liberal."