Under the guise of restoring “balance and objectivity” to PBS, Ken Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is trying to impose a conservative agenda on public television. The latest: He secretly spent over $14,000 of CPB money for a study into whether Bill Moyer’s program “Now” had a liberal bias. He then attacked “Now,” complaining it “does not contain anything approaching the balance the law requires for public broadcasting.”

Who are these biased liberals slanting that show? According to Tomlinson’s study, Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) is now a big leftie. In the raw data from Tomlinson’s study, Hagel was classified “as a ‘liberal’ for an appearance on a segment of a show that questioned the Bush Administration’s policies in Iraq.”

Forget balanced and objective, Mr. Tomlinson. How about accurate?

This email from MoveAmericaForward just landed in my inbox. I think it’s fair to say that it echoes most commentary from the right about this issue (italics added):

Some left-wing politicians (like Illinois Senator Dick Durbin) have taken to the airwaves and accused American servicemen and women of engaging in conduct akin to the “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others.”

We’re not making this up.

A liberal Democrat U.S. SENATOR is accusing our troops of acting like Nazi soldiers or the Soviet Communists who ran the gulags that tortured political prisoners.

Even immediately after Durbin’s remarks were publicized, it was clear to all but the most cynical/partisan critics that he did not actually see U.S. soldiers in the same light as Nazis.

But now, after numerous explanations of what he meant, and a clarification from Durbin himself, it’s just downright dishonest to say that Durbin is accusing our troops of acting like Nazis.

Which leads to a question that conservatives and the media (which is working on its fifth day of coverage of this story) might ask: at what point does it become unpatriotic to mislead our soldiers into believing that one of their own senators has accused them of acting like Nazis? How does that improve their morale?

The Bush administration has gotten into the nasty habit of doctoring its reports whenever the facts don’t match its preconceived agenda. Here are some instances of the White House’s magic pen at work:

Cattle Grazing: “The Bush administration altered critical portions of a scientific analysis of the environmental impact of cattle grazing on public lands before announcing relaxed grazing limits on those lands, according to scientists involved in the study…conclusions that the proposed rules might adversely affect water quality and wildlife, including endangered species, were excised and replaced with language justifying less-stringent regulations favored by cattle ranchers.”

Hog Farming: Nationally respected Agriculture Department microbiologist Dr. Zahn discovered that hog farms were emitting drug-resistant airborne bacteria that “if breathed by humans, would make them harder to treat when ill. Zahn presented his findings at a scientific conference in 2000, but the Bush administration stopped him from publishing his data 11 times between September 2001 and April 2002, he said. When Danish researchers sought to learn more about his work, Zahn wasn’t allowed to share his techniques.”

Climate Change: “A White House official who once led the oil industry’s fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents [The] official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.”

Air Quality at Ground Zero: “In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, the White House instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to give the public misleading information, telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was not available. That finding is included in a report released Friday by the Office of the Inspector General of the EPA. It noted that some of the agency’s news releases in the weeks after the attack were softened before being released to the public: Reassuring information was added, while cautionary information was deleted.” Read more

The conservative blogosphere, desperate to discredit the Downing Street Minutes, is abuzz with the ridiculous rumor that London Times reporter Michael Smith — who broke the DSM story — used to work for Mary Mapes at CBS. The extremely popular site Little Green Footballs breathlessly asks:

Is British reporter Michael Smith, who broke the Downing Street memo story…the same Michael Smith who was hired by Mary Mapes as a CBS assistant producer in the Rathergate scandal?

The rumor is repeated on right-wing blogs here, here, here, here and here.

It took me a grand total of one phone call to CBS to see if this rumor was true. The answer is no. The Michael Smith who used to work for Mary Mapes is not the same Michael Smith who writes for the London times.

You may think that the Bush administration’s strategy is the Middle East — including the war in Iraq — isn’t going so well. This morning Condoleezza Rice offered a different perspective. Not only is the administration’s policy successful, it is the only administration that has been successful for the last six decades:

For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course.

Among other things, her comments were a slap in the face to the Reagan and Bush I administrations, Rice’s former employers.