EDITORIAL THE PBS SPECTACLE PARTISAN POLITICS SKEW DEBATE OVER PUBLIC BROADCASTING.

AT a time when our nation is at war, its health care system in disarray, its immigration laws a mess and Social Security facing long-term instability, the politicians in Washington have us arguing about ... Big Bird.

This is no accident. Drawing our attention away from the big issues is a neat way for politicians to conceal their failure to lead.

That's not to say there aren't serious matters at stake in the controversy over the Corporation for Public Broadcasting - only that those matters have been inflamed by the usual partisan rancor.

The CPB, which provides federal subsidies for NPR and PBS stations across the country, should be free of political manipulation. Government- funded programming can easily become propaganda, and for this reason keeping the CPB independent and, if not objective, at least ideologically balanced, is crucial. PBS continues to play an important role in our democratic society.

But these are issues that, were Democrats and Republicans more interested in cooperating than in smearing each other, would be easy to resolve. After all, both parties claim to want the same thing - fair and independent public broadcasting.

The problem is that in our hyper-partisan age, bias is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Republicans, mindful that CPB was a creation of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, have long maintained that it skews left. Democrats see no such bias. Democrats cite polls showing that respondents think PBS is balanced, but Republicans question those findings.

So Democrats reasonably worry about conservative CPB Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson's efforts to ``balance'' PBS. Under Tomlinson's leadership, new conservative-theme shows have been launched, and conservative operatives have been brought in to assess whether programming is biased.

Democrats don't like the idea of Republicans determining what constitutes ``balance'' any more than Republicans would like to see Democrats making the same assessment. And, by extension, Democrats are furious that a former Republican National Committee co-chairwoman has been named the corporation's new president. Republicans counter that Democratic officials have held similar posts in the past.

Like Washington's last hyper-partisan brouhaha - the spat over filibustering judicial nominees - it's easy to imagine that were federal power dynamics different, Republicans and Democrats would be making the opposite arguments about the CPB that they are now. The courts, like the CPB, must be independent and nonpartisan.

If both sides are sincere in wanting to keep CPB independent and balanced, they should have little difficulty finding an agreeable solution.

Allow us to present one:

Assemble a fully bipartisan commission, filled with sensible, diplomatic Democrats and Republicans, to fairly assess programming and determine what - if any - changes are needed. The process for appointing CPB leadership should also be depoliticized, so that authority doesn't lie with congressional leaders or the White House, but a fully bipartisan panel.

How hard is that? Working constructively, it wouldn't be difficult for both sides to strike a fair compromise - assuming they wanted to.

But once again, the partisans seem more interested in scoring points and in firing up the base than in actually resolving their differences. They fight more to create a spectacle than to create good policy.

So the spectacle, not the lack of good policy, consumes our attention, which is exactly the way they want it. And everyone loses.