Republicans on a U.S. House subcommittee voted last week to ax federal funds for public broadcasting. They must have been too busy playing Monopoly when they were children to absorb Big Bird’s friendly lessons about cooperation and sharing on Sesame Street.

This is the latest attack in a war declared on the Public Broadcasting System by GOP leaders who accuse it of political bias. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s new chairman is Kenneth Tomlinson, the Republican former head of Voice of America and Reader’s Digest. Tomlinson has been doing all he can to turn PBS into a cuddly lap dog for the Bush administration.

Eliminating taxpayer support for popular children’s shows like Arthur and Sesame Street comes as no surprise from a Congress and a president that have targeted many popular educational initiatives. One example in the president’s current budget proposal is zeroing-out Even Start, which aims to help disadvantaged young people obtain their GEDs. While mouthing platitudes about the importance of education, national leaders make it a lesser priority than tax cuts for the wealthy. In this reshuffling of national budget priorities, educational TV for children is merely a nuisance to the radicals intent on dismantling as much as possible of the federal government.

But the Republican campaign against PBS and National Public Radio goes deeper than budget cutting. It’s more of a grudge match against two of the most serious news sources in the nation, operations whose relative insulation from corporate advertising and political interference has been key to decades of unbiased, insightful coverage.

Congressional Republicans have long been furious at Bill Moyers, the low- key former press secretary for Democratic President Lyndon Johnson whose program Now objectively examined some of the nation’s entrenched economic interests. With Moyers’ departure, Now has been toned down, and PBS has added to its line-up a program featuring the Wall Street Journal’s hard-right editorial page contributors.

As Moyers said in a May 15 speech, “The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party became. That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth.”

People like Tomlinson and GOP members of the House appropriations subcommittee expect all news organizations to defer to the Bush agenda with the same vapid obedience as the Fox Network. These are people to whom fair and balanced translates into slavish and sycophantic.

The American people need to speak up and tell Congress to leave PBS and NPR alone. They are doing exactly what they are funded to do, providing clean and clear coverage of important issues, and a forum for people of all political persuasions, not just the one in power at the moment.