Saturn in Cancer: Muzzling the Muppets

Saturn in Cancer has historically been a time of restrictions and limitations put on women and children. Our present time is no exception as children's lives are under attack by military recruiters making unwelcome and unsolicited telephone calls to their homes as though they are their friends, and now, the takeover of children's public television programming which began blossoming about 30 years ago........



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The Bush administration wants to force public broadcasting to toe the Republican line



Ken Tomlinson may be America's most accomplished propagandist. He got his start as an intern for Fulton Lewis Jr., who ruled right-wing radio when Rush Limbaugh was still in diapers. In the early 1980s, Tomlinson ran Voice of America, promoting the policies of Ronald Reagan to the rest of the world. As editor in chief of Reader's Digest in the early 1990s, he published the most reliably reactionary magazine in the country. Now, as President Bush's handpicked chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Tomlinson is in a position to spread the Republican message to Sesame Street.



As head of the board that doles out $400 million in federal funds for public broadcasting, Tomlinson is actually required by law to provide PBS and NPR with "maximum protection from extraneous influence and control" by meddling politicians. But in recent months, Tomlinson himself has been the one trying to alter PBS programming. A close friend of Karl Rove since they worked together overseeing Voice of America, he hired a right-wing consultant to secretly monitor Bill Moyers for signs of "liberal bias." He collaborated with the White House to hire two "ombudsmen" to keep an eye on Frontline and All Things Considered. And after President Bush was re-elected in November, Tomlinson warned a gathering of PBS executives that the country had moved to the right -- and that their programming should reflect that.



Welcome to a new era in the battle over public broadcasting. Instead of simply threatening to cut federal funding for PBS -- as Nixon, Reagan and Newt Gingrich did -- the Bush administration has taken a new approach. Far from standing as a firewall against outside political pressure, Tomlinson is trying to force PBS to toe the Republican line, turning the network into a taxpayer-funded facsimile of Fox News. The GOP coup scored a major victory in late June, when the CPB board quietly confirmed Patricia Harrison -- a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee -- as its new president.



The full story from RollingStone.com