A second letter from Ted Cruz prompted a reply from CPB this week in which it answered the Republican senator’s questions about recordings of board meetings that had temporarily been unavailable to the public.
In a Feb. 22 letter, Cruz asked CPB to explain why audio from board meetings before October 2022 was made private and why recordings of meetings since October 2022 had been removed from its website. CPB posts audio from its board meetings on SoundCloud and embeds the SoundCloud files on its website.
“Simply put, CPB’s erasure of these recordings looks like a ham-fisted attempt to avoid public scrutiny and shield material from congressional oversight,” Cruz wrote in the letter, which was posted in an article by the Daily Caller.
His letter followed a December inquiry in which he questioned the constitutionality of CPB’s diversity policy for Community Service Grant recipients. Cruz’s communications staff has not responded to questions from Current.
In a letter to Cruz Thursday, CPB CEO Patricia Harrison said that a CPB technician mistakenly “clicked the wrong setting” when he was adjusting settings on the corporation’s SoundCloud profile.
“By doing so, he inadvertently suspended public access to some of the audio recordings of our board meetings,” she wrote.
CPB has restored public access to the board meeting audio. Harrison told Cruz that CPB learned about the mistake from his letter and addressed it the same day.
CPB “never sought to prevent public access to the audio recordings of our board meetings,” Harrison wrote. “CPB is proud of our commitment to and practice of transparency, and we believe our handling of this matter confirms that commitment.”
CPB began making audio from open sessions of board meetings publicly available in 2006, which “exceeds the open meeting requirements of the Public Broadcasting Act,” Harrison wrote.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Cruz asked why recordings of meetings since October 2022 had been made private. Cruz asked why recordings of meetings before October 2022 had been made private and why recordings of meetings since October 2022 had been removed from CPB’s website.