Take That, Ken Tomlinson

From today's Studio Briefing (available soon at IMDB):

Despite attempts by some Republicans to portray PBS and NPR programs as biased in favor of liberals, a Harris Poll indicates that the public broadcasting outlets are trusted more than any of the commercial broadcast and cable news organizations. As reported by Broadcasting & Cable, 61 percent of the public trusted news on PBS and NPR while 53 percent trusted the broadcasters. Only 35 percent said that they trust conservative radio talk-show hosts; and just 31 percent said they trust liberal radio talk-show hosts.

[UPDATE - 1:10pm] This just came over the RSS transom from the LATimes via Raw Story:

The former chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting repeatedly violated the organization's contracting rules and code of ethics in his efforts to promote conservatives in the system, according to an internal investigation released today.

The 42-page report — the culmination of a six-month investigation by Kenneth A. Konz, the corporation's inspector general — described former Chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson as a rogue politico who overstepped the boundaries of his position to right what he viewed as a liberal tilt in public broadcasting.
[...]
Konz and his nine-member staff documented numerous occasions in which Tomlinson circumvented the corporation's contracting procedures in trying to hire his own handpicked candidates to study the political balance in public broadcasting.

According to the report, Tomlinson failed to get board approval for his hiring of a consultant, Fred Mann, to monitor the political leanings of the guests on "Now With Bill Moyers" and three other programs. Mann, who divided guests into categories such as "pro-Bush" and "anti-Bush," was paid $20,200 for an analysis that was "not sophisticated," the report said.

Tomlinson also had inappropriate involvement in the development of "The Journal Editorial Report," a public affairs program that began airing on PBS in September 2004, Konz wrote.