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Mark Shields is a nationally known columnist and commentator. |
Do conservatives really believe in the free market?
Washington -- I first met Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the former chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), when he supported Jack Kemp for president in 1988. I ran into him again in 1996, when he was working in Steve Forbes' presidential campaign. In limited dealings with him, I found Tomlinson to be smart, direct and a committed conservative. Now, a six-month investigation by the CPB's inspector general charges (and he denies) that Tomlinson, as chairman of the agency created by Congress to distribute federal funds to non-commercial TV stations, "violated statutory provisions and the Director's Code of Ethics" in his zeal to promote conservative programming. For at least 15 years, it has been an article of faith among American conservatives that public radio and public television must be " de-funded." Conservative think tanks, commentators and politicians appeared to be reading from identical talking points: Cable TV has expanded the program possibilities; let the genius of the free market determine what audiences are willing to watch and to pay for; the hard-earned money of free Americans ought not to be taken from them through federal taxation to subsidize the elitist fare of public television. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been a dependable and formidable champion for weaning public broadcasting from its federal dependency. Ironically, the conservative program that, according to the inspector general, then-Chairman Tomlinson improperly bullied onto the PBS schedule and pushed to fund so generously was "The Journal Editorial Report," a current-events program featuring members of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. The editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the host of the Tomlinson-backed PBS show was Paul Gigot, a respected journalist and agreeable colleague with whom I had sparred weekly for eight years on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." These Journal panelists are all in near total agreement that tax cuts and unfettered free enterprise are good, while government regulation (with the possible exception of federally mandated de-icing of airline wings in sub-zero weather) and most Democrats aren't. The Wall Street Journal editors program was not a brand new TV show. It had appeared, until it was cancelled in January 2003, on the cable business channel CNBC, which Dow Jones, the publisher of the Journal, owns jointly with NBC. There you have it. "The Journal Editorial Report," for whatever reasons, did not survive in the private marketplace. Like most TV shows -- including more than a few on which your faithful correspondent has appeared -- "The Journal Editorial Report" was cancelled. The market, as we are regularly told, is about winners and losers. Thus, a show that was the indirect offspring of Dow Jones, a publishing and financial juggernaut, is given a multimillion-dollar transfusion of taxpayer money and placed on the PBS Friday night schedule. Do you see any inconsistencies or contradictions in this saga of free-enterprise true-believers turning their backs on the genius of the marketplace and seeking and accepting a federal subsidy? It's enough to make you wonder if conservatives really do believe in the free market.
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