As the NY Times reported last week, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting had a secret study conducted of PBS's "Now With Bill Moyers" in which guests were placed in categories like "anti-Bush," "anti-business," and "anti-Tom Delay." From this, he concluded that "Now" was not politically balanced.

The problem with this sort of "study" is that -- like so many other attempts to divide the world into "liberal" and "conservative" -- it utterly ignores context. So Bill Moyers does an exposé on a chemical plant that knowingly lies to employees about the health risks of the substances they work with; the employees fail to take precautions, get sick, and die. Is that "anti-business" reporting? Only if you think businesses should be free to murder their workers. If anything, Moyers is exhibiting a pro-life bias. Damn him!

The larger point is, such a story is neither "liberal" or "conservative." It should cause us all concern.

And sorry, anyone who criticizes Tom Delay is not "anti-Tom Delay." Try "anti-corruption." As I've said before, how big a crook does someone have to be before we can call them a crook without being accused of partisanship?

Perhaps the distinction the CPB chair should have made is between ideologically-driven bullshit and fact-based investigative journalism. PBS does display a tendency toward the latter.

One final note: In the last panel of this week's cartoon, my point is not to criticize anyone's belief in creationism -- but rather, the insistence that creationism be considered science.