PBS: Researcher's Appraisals of Commentators Are Released

WASHINGTON, June 30 - A researcher secretly retained by the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to monitor liberal bias in public radio and television set his sights on several media personalities, including Bill Moyers, Tucker Carlson, Tavis Smiley, David Brancaccio and Diane Rehm, according to documents made public Thursday.

Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, released 50 pages of what he called the "work product" of Fred Mann, a researcher who has been connected to conservative journalism centers and who was hired by the corporation's chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson. Mr. Dorgan pronounced the work "a little nutty" and a sham.

The documents do not form a complete report, but are instead a string of synopses of public radio and television programs, accompanied by charts analyzing the political leanings of the guests. The central conclusion appears to have been that most public radio and television guests were liberal, and that even those who were conservative were critical of President Bush.

The research, which Mr. Dorgan said cost taxpayers $14,700, sent ripples throughout the public broadcast community, where journalists and executives - who believed until Thursday that the review was limited to "Now," with Bill Moyers - seemed stunned to learn they were also being scrutinized.

"Is it being done to somehow force public broadcasting into some kind of retreat?" asked Ms. Rehm, who has been host of "The Diane Rehm Show," a news and interview program, on public radio for 25 years. "Is it done to frighten people to somehow alert them to the fact that they are being watched?"

Ms. Rehm may have had reason to feel aggrieved. When she interviewed Mr. Tomlinson on her program last month - nearly a year after Mr. Mann finished his largely critical, but then still secret, review of her show - Mr. Tomlinson called himself "a great admirer" of hers.

"Frankly," Ms. Rehm said Thursday, "I feel used."

The corporation, which directs taxpayer dollars to public radio and television, has drawn more scrutiny in recent months, as Mr. Tomlinson has made plain a desire to assure what he considers political balance in the programming it underwrites.

Kevin Kline, president and chief executive of National Public Radio, said Thursday that he feared that the relationship between the corporation and NPR's member stations was being damaged irrevocably.

Mr. Kline described himself as "rather angry and very concerned that the CPB staff and the board go forward in a way to find some stability in this relationship."

"They've created these peculiar documents from a man who was apparently under personal orders, I guess, from Mr. Tomlinson," he said. "I don't know what the order was; we don't know what the purpose was."

That is now the subject of an investigation by the corporation's inspector general, who is looking into several decisions by Mr. Tomlinson. Those include the use of a White House official to establish an ombudsman's office to scrutinize public radio and television for political balance, payments to two Republican lobbyists and the hiring of Mr. Mann.

A spokesman for the corporation declined to comment on the documents, citing the investigation. Mr. Mann could not be reached.

His research, however, provides a window into his efforts to categorize public figures in Washington. The guests are tagged with labels - liberal, conservative, neutral - though in some cases, Mr. Dorgan said, Mr. Mann was wrong. He classified Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, for example, generally regarded as a mainstream conservative Republican, as "liberal."

At times, Mr. Mann provided commentary. "Moyers used that to clobber recent Bush position on single media ownership in one market," he wrote in analyzing a "Now" segment that featured Jim Bouton, a former major-league baseball player.

After Ms. Rehm interviewed Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, retired, who had been critical of the war in Iraq, Mr. Mann wrote that she "'failed to ask any obvious questions" reflecting an opposing point of view.

Ms. Rehm, whose show is broadcast over 95 stations to 1.5 million listeners, said she tried to make her show "the most informative, the least imbalanced, the least polemical" it could be. Of Mr. Mann, she said, "Anybody is free to listen and make judgments, and everybody does."