And now we return once again (cue: swirl of soapy organ music) to As Public Broadcasting Turns. That’s kind of what I hear inside my head whenever I read news reports about the ongoing tensions in the Corporation for Public Broadcasting linked to the work of chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, who, reporters always remind us, had this strange idea that PBS and NPR lean to the left.

One of the Big Ideas of this blog is that it is almost impossible to talk about the news business in terms of a pure “left” vs. “right” content, at least if you are going to use the old-fashioned definitions of words such as “conservative” and “liberal.” Most of our political conflicts today — other than issues of war and peace — are rooted in social, moral, cultural and even religious issues, not issues of economics.