More good news about NPR and PBS

Dear MoveOn member,

Yesterday, the Senate Appropriations committee voted to fully fund public broadcasting. Going beyond the House victory, which restored funding to public broadcasting's general budget, the Senate also agreed to commit over $100 million to children's programming and critical technology upgrades.

This is another great victory. The mighty show of support you mustered when the House tried to slash funding helped keep this Senate committee from even considering such a move. Senators knew the public would not stand for anything less than full support.

The funding measure is expected to be approved by the full Senate in September. The difference between the House and Senate budgets for public broadcasting will then be worked out in a conference. At that time, we'll raise our voices once again to ensure the Senate version prevails.

But public broadcasting faces another threat right now: Corporation for Public Broadcasting head Kenneth Tomlinson is attempting a right-wing takeover of our public TV and radio. In a survey last week, 94% of you said we should take on Tomlinson to prevent his partisan interference. Given the strong interest, we'll start on that effort next week.

Thank you for all you do.

–Noah, Carrie, Wes, Rosalyn and the MoveOn.org Team
Friday, July 15th, 2005

P.S. You can read more about Tomlinson's effort to inject partisanship into public broadcasting in this month's Rolling Stone magazine. Click here to read it online:

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=782&t=1