Two weeks ago, the Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Ken Tomlinson, began to make threats against PBS for an alleged liberal bias. Now Tomlinson is setting his scope on NPR, according to The New York Times' Steven Labaton:

Executives at National Public Radio are increasingly at odds with the Bush appointees who lead the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In one of several points of conflict in recent months, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which allocates federal funds for public radio and television, is considering a plan to monitor Middle East coverage on NPR news programs for evidence of bias, a corporation spokesman said on Friday.

[...]

Mr. Tomlinson has been waging a campaign to correct what he and other conservatives see as a liberal bias in public television programming. That effort has been criticized by leaders of public television who say it poses a threat to their editorial independence. At the request of two senior Democratic members of Congress, the inspector general at the corporation is examining whether Mr. Tomlinson's decision to monitor only one television program, "Now," with Bill Moyers, and his decision to retain a White House official who helped create guidelines for the two ombudsmen may have violated a law that is supposed to insulate public broadcasting from politics.

For the CPB, whose board "is dominated by Republicans named by President Bush," to try to force NPR and PBS to adhere to a conservative Republican political agenda is a total violation of the corporation's purpose. What's more, it's a real danger to the American people. The day the government begins to tell broadcasters what they can and cannot say is the last day that the first amendment has any teeth. Hopefully the inspector general will feel the same way.