PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler posted an item Monday about a previous topic he discussed: concerns over the funding of a PBS program by David Koch. The Sept. 2 piece focused on concerns about billionaire Koch's anti-Obama efforts, anti-global warming beliefs, ties to the fuel industry and concerns that had been raised about how that might have affected the “Becoming Human” series he helped fund.

In the Sept. 2 item, Getler wrote:

First come viewer suspicions about the subject that generated the most mail this week: the broadcasting of the first of a three-part series titled “Becoming Human” on NOVA, the popular and award-winning PBS science program. I get very few complaints about NOVA programs -- and this series initially aired in 2009. No complaints, at least that I can recall, at that time. But timing is everything, and the re-broadcast this week of Part One came in the immediate aftermath of a now widely quoted article in The New Yorker magazine by writer Jane Mayer about David and Charles Koch, “the billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama,” as the article's sub-title claims, and a follow-up assessment by New York Times columnist Frank Rich.

So what does this have to do with NOVA? One thing is that David H. Koch, as an individual rather than the Koch Foundation, is among the funders of NOVA. Another is that among his many interests, according to Rich's summary of the Mayer piece, “Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial -- a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries' vast fossil fuel business.”

At the end of the item, Getler added in a note:

One rarely knows when or how, if at all, influence works its way. If it is a factor, it can come from outside or from within. As a viewer of what strikes me and a lot of others as a consistently first-rate program, I trust NOVA.

Fast forward to Monday, Getler updated the item with a notice saying he should not have judged the program based on his past trust of NOVA, writing:

... one of the things I said in a brief ombudsman's note in my Sept. 2 posting was: “I trust NOVA,” the long-running PBS science program. It was an honest, quick reaction on my part. But I should have been more cautious. It was too off-handed a comment in my role as ombudsman because some viewers were raising legitimate questions -- specifically about the financial support of one individual sponsor, billionaire David H. Koch, of the “Becoming Human” series -- and something akin to “trust, but verify” would have been more appropriate at the time. I don't expect readers to ponder the difference between ombudsman mailbags and columns, but the earlier posting was a mailbag in which viewer e-mails that had accumulated while I was away in August were posted and I made only brief observations, as opposed to the longer examinations of specific issues that make up columns.