From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Bob Garfield is away this week.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

You listen to public radio so you probably know that public broadcasting's federal funding came under the acts again.

Half of the $200 million proposed cut was restored by a House Amendment on Thursday, but the exercise itself was instructive.

The cut was put forth partly as an austerity measure, and partly, some say, as a response to perceived bias.

It seems some legislators wanted to clip the wings, not a big bird, but Bill Moyers, and salt the ground he walked upon.

The flag belongs to the country, not to the government.

Moyers read from one of his PBS commentaries in a recent speech.

And it reminds me that it's not un-American to think that war, except in self-defense,

is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomacy.

The issue of bias was raised explicitly by Ken Tomlinson,

chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,

through which federal money flows to the public broadcasting system.

He hired a conservative ideologue, Fred Mann,

to monitor bias in Moyers PBS show,

and this week the CPP Board announced its new president

will be former State Department official and Republican National Committee co-chair Patricia Harrison,

who North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan described as a partisan political figure entirely wrong for the job.

After all, the CPP Board is supposed to act as a political heat shield for public broadcasting,

but since it's appointed by the president, that's hard to do.

So every year, public broadcasters trudge up Capitol Hill to justify their subsidy,

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