"WGBH, the Public Broadcasting Service's flagship station in Boston, paid John Martilla to run the focus groups last month, WGBH spokeswoman Jeanne Hopkins told The Washington Times."

Martilla is now one of the Kerry campaign's top strategists and was described last week by the Washington Post as "a longtime Kerry advisor" who helped him prep for debates against Gov. Bill Weld in 1996.

In July 1999, PBS's Boston flagship WGBH admitted to helping in Democratic Party fund-raising efforts since 1994, sharing with the DNC the names of 32,000 PBS donors. The Boston Globe said the fund-raising deal was carried out despite "clear prohibitions against tax-exempt groups [like PBS] engaging in political acts."

By the time the full dimensions of the scandal at Lehrer's network became known, 53 PBS affiliates had admitted supplying donor names to the DNC, which then was gearing up to defeat George W. Bush in the 2000 election.

While Republicans are loath to challenge Lehrer on even such a blatant conflict of interest, Democrats have expressed delight that they've been able to install him as a moderator for presidential debates going back more than a decade.

In 1997, George Stephanopoulos – fresh from his stint at the Clinton White House – described Lehrer as "our moderator."

Explaining the Clinton re-election campaign's debate strategy in 1996, Stephanopoulos told a panel on presidential politics: "We wanted the debates to be a non-event. As long as we would agree to Perot not being in it, we could get everything else we wanted going in. We got out time frame, we got our length, we got our moderator."

"Imagine if the Bush-Cheney campaign had pushed for Rush Limbaugh to moderate the debates," complained one longtime Washington observer. "Can you imagine the media howls?"

Editor's note: