The story I've come to share with you goes to the core of our belief that the quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined. I can tell this story because I've been living it. As Dr. Wilson said, it's been in the news this week, including more [attacks] tax on a single journalist, yours truly, by the right wing media and their friends at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As you know, CPB was established almost forty years ago to set broad policy for public broadcasting and to be a fire-wall between political influence and program content. What some on its board are now doing today, led by its chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, is too important, too disturbing, and yes, even dangerous for a gathering like this not to address it. We're seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age old ambition of power and ideology to squelch -- to punish the journalist who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable....

When Senator Lott protested that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has not seemed willing to deal with Bill Moyers, a new member of the board, a Republican fund-raiser named Cheryl Halpern, who had been appointed by President Bush, agreed that CPB needed more power to do just that sort of thing. She left no doubt about the kind of penalty she would like to see imposed on the malefactors.

Now, hear me again: as rumors circulated about all this, I asked to meet with the entire CBS board - I wanted to - CPB Board, thank you. I wanted to hear for myself what they were saying. I thought it would be helpful for someone like me who had been present at the creation and part of the system for almost forty years, to talk about how CPB had been intended to be a heat shield to protect public broadcasters from exactly this kind of intimidation. After all, I'd been there at the time of Richard Nixon's attempted coup. In those days, public television had been really feisty and independent and often targeted for attacks. A Woody Allen special that poked fun at Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration had actually been cancelled. Jon Stewart wouldn't have stood a chance if he had started his career on PBS. The White House had been so outraged over a documentary called "The Banks and the Poor" about discrimination, about rich financial institutions against the poor, that PBS was driven to adopt new guidelines. That didn't satisfy Nixon, and when public television hired two NBC reporters, the radicals Robert McNeil and Sander Vanocur to co-anchor some new broadcast, it was, for Nixon, the last straw. According to White House memos at the time, he was determined, (quote), "to get the left wing commentators who are cutting us up off public television at once; indeed, yesterday, if possible." Sound familiar?

Nixon vetoed the authorization for CPB with a message written in part by his sidekick and soul mate, Pat Buchanan, who castigated Vanocur, McNeil, "Washington Week in Review," "Black Journal" and Bill Moyers as, (quote), "unbalanced against the administration." It is familiar. I always knew Nixon would be back, again and again. I just didn't know that this time he would ask to be Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Buchanan and Nixon succeeded in cutting CPB funding for all public affairs programming, except for "Black Journal." They knocked out most of your funding for the National Public Affairs Center for Television, otherwise known as NPACT. And they voted to take away from the PBS staff the ultimate responsibility for the production of programming.

But in those days - and this is what I wanted to share with Kenneth Tomlinson, who I have never met, and his colleagues on the CPB board -- in those days there were still Republicans in America who did not march in ideological lockstep and who stood on principle against politicizing public television. The chairman of the public station in Dallas was an industrialist named Ralph Rogers, a Republican but no party hack, who saw the White House intimidation as an assault on freedom of the press and led a nationwide effort to stop it. The chairman at the time of the CPB was a former Republican Congressman, Thomas Curtis, from here in St. Louis - from here in Missouri, who was also a principled man. He resigned, claiming White House interference. Within a few months, the crisis was over. CPB maintained its independence, PBS grew in strength, and Richard Nixon would face impeachment and resign for violating the public trust and not just public broadcasting. Paradoxically, the very -- talk about justice. In fact, I once asked a wise - a friend of mine, a wise old man in Washington, what he had learned from life, could he reduce it to one sentence? And he said, "Yes. There ain't no justice in the world. Now, get on with it."

But here was cosmic justice. The very Public Affairs Center for Television that Nixon had tried to kill, NPACT, put PBS on the map by re-broadcasting in prime time each day's Watergate hearings, drawing huge ratings night after night and establishing PBS as an ally of democracy. We should still be doing that sort of thing. C-SPAN, bless its heart, shouldn't be the only channel that lets us see how democracy works.

That was thirty-three years ago and I thought the current CPB board would like to hear and talk about the importance of standing up to political interference. I was wrong. They wouldn't meet with me. I tried three times and failed three times, and it was all downhill after that. I was naive, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying out for the White House. But that's what Kenneth Tomlinson has been doing.