For more than two decades, "political conservatives have been targeting PBS ... with a stream of public relations campaigns designed to rein in public broadcasting's independence and cut into its public and congressional support." Both the Nixon and Reagan administrations attacked public broadcasting and, as speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich tried to end its funding. E-mail petitions -- with "Save Big Bird!" subject lines -- that implored you to save public broadcasting from destruction used to be the stuff of urban legend. But leave it to conservatives to ultimately succeed in turning fiction into reality. Right-wingers are taking over the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the agency intended to provide a buffer between independent public broadcast networks and the partisan government. And they are working overtime to put a conservative slant on programming, a move that completely undermines the non-interference mandate of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act. This week right-wingers in the House voted to cut all federal funding for public broadcasting within the next two years. Unless the public demands respect for independent and public broadcasting, soon nobody will be able to tell you how to get to Sesame Street. Write Congress and demand that they save PBS from partisan operatives.