I am huge consumer of PBS. I'm a member of the local PBS station in the Bay Area KQED. I listen to NPR like a fiend. I get most of my TV news from Jim Lehrer. I feel that it's a great service to America, especially now at time when media polarization is such a problem and become so extreme.

However there is a move that's been in the works for a few years by the Bush administration to covertly turn PBS television into another spoke on the wheel of the Republican Noise Machine. Ken Auletta has written a New Yorker expose called Big Bird Flies Right about how conservatives, who once tried to crush the Corporation for Public Broadcasting under the Nixon and Reagan administrations and through the Gingrich "Contract on America", have now embraced PBS as yet another conduit for their message.

Conservatives have long pounded their phony "liberal bias" hammer on the PBS door. Basically they found out that Americans actually love PBS and according to a Corporation for Public Broadcasting survey, "the majority of the U.S. adult population does not believe that the news and information programming on public broadcasting is biased." So when politicians seriously threaten public funding of the CPB, they are often tossed out of office. But conservatives wanted to control the public airwaves so they have changed their tactics from siege from without to an insurgency from within.

Bill Moyers, who helped craft the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967 when he was an advisor to the Johnson administration, and has long been part of the PBS programming is gone, replaced by the conservative voice of CNN's Crossfire talking head Tucker Carlson and Wall Street Journal editorial-page editor Paul Gigot. Both of these pundits have loud megaphones in their regular jobs, reaching a far greater audience then they ever will through PBS. This flies in the face of the PBS mission to serve the underserved. That aside, PBS has no counterparts for these two shows on the progressive side of the political spectrum. Nothing.

These changes have come under the auspices of CPB chairman Kenneth Tomlinson. Now Tomlinson was appointed to the job by Clinton and did a very fine job of maintaining PBS's balance with objectivity as you might expect from someone with his journalism background. That is until Bush came along. Tomlinson just happens to be really good friends with Karl Rove, and Karl is not going to let something like the public trust get in the way of wallpapering the media landscape with the conservative agenda.

Tomlinson has appointed two "ombudsmen" to oversee programming at PBS. Why there needs to be two is a matter of debate, but it clearly undermines the tradition of a single impartial observer that most ombudsmen represent. But the two appointees, Ken Bode and William Schulz, are hardly impartial. Bode, a former NBC and CNN reporter, most recently worked as a columnist for the Indianapolis Star, where readers often wrote angry letters deriding him as a liberal, though he endorsed a Republican last year for governor of Indiana. While Bode alone would make a decent ombudsman, alongside Schulz, an avowed conservative and former editor at Reader's Digest, they represent a tag team joke whose mission can only be to ensure that PBS toes a right wing line.

This is hardly Tomlinson's most egregious indiscretion. Recently Reps. David Obey (D-WI), and John Dingel (D-MI), asked the CPB's inspector general to investigate whether Tomlinson overstepped the law by secretly hiring a consultant, at a cost of $10,000, to monitor the weekly PBS news program "Now With Bill Moyers" for liberal bias. The Democrats want a determination of whether Tomlinson violated the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which "prohibits interference by Federal officials over the content and distribution of public programming" and the application of political litmus tests in hiring decisions. Interestingly, Tomlison has refused to reveal the results of his secret investigation, which I suspect, don't support his case that NOW was in fact biased one way or the other.

For his part, Moyers, who retired from NOW after staying on to cover post 9/11 issues, has blasted Tomlinson, accusing him of trying to silence journalists who ask tough questions, saying, "That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth."

In the midst of these battles, Media Matters founder David Brock, right wing journalistic hitman turned progressive media watchdog, has launched a campaign for conservatives to keep their mitts off PBS. It's amazing to me that the same guy that unleashed the faux "Troopegate" story that directly to the Special Investigor and to the impeachment of Bill Clinton is now a crusader on the left for accuracy in media, but there it is. You can read all about his conversion from the dark side in .

So if you care at all about PBS, NPR or public broadcasting in general, you take action, call you station and .