Moon over PBS?

Two stories we have followed may be linked. The scandalous behavior of Ken Tomlinson -- the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting who wants to inject more Coulteresque commentary into NPR and PBS -- has a connection with the Reverend Moon's media empire.

Tomlinson paid an Indiana man some $15,000 to monitor the alleged bias of PBS personality Bill Moyer. (Note that Wall Street Week and Firing Line never received that level of scrutiny.) That's a lot of money just to watch television. We may fairly ask if the recipient performed other services.

The recipient was one Fred Mann. This is the fellow who is so far to the right that he identified Chuck Hagel as a "liberal."

Two other Republican lobbyists were also paid $15,000 as part of Tomlinson's effort. Obviously, something decidedly odd is going on here.

So: Who is Fred Mann?

In 1997-98, reporting in Insight On The News -- the biweekly owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church -- senior writer David Webster (now an associate professor of law at Pat Robertson's Regent University) used Mann as a source several times.

Readers will recall that the powers behind GOPUSA (Jeff Gannon's old roost) had similar histories in the Moon orbit.

Mann, like Tomlinson, also has a history with Reader's Digest. (National Review -- founded by a CIA man -- considers Tomlinson the "last great editor" of the Digest.) I suppose it would be impolitic to mention the fact that, some fifteen years ago, Covert Action printed a story linking the Digest to the CIA. That spooky relationship was explored at much greater length in John Heidenry's book Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and Dewitt Wallace and the story of the Reader's Digest, and in Peter Canning's American Dreamers -- The Wallaces and Reader's Digest: An Insider's Story. From a review of the latter volume:

Among other things, Canning details how, in the 1940s and 50s, the State Department and CIA fed content to the Digest and helped its international editions thrive. He also notes the magazine's numerous pro-Vietnam War editorials, and the way Nixon speeches found their way into the magazine under the byline "The Editors." Further, Canning dishes a good deal of dirt about founders Dewitt and Lila Wallace's odd sex lives, and he digs into the story behind the sex discrimination suit filed against the Digest in 1976, among the largest ever, in which 2,600 female employees were awarded more than $1.5 million.

Mann does not appear to be just another resident of Indiana. He has overt links to the far-right National Journalism Center and less-overt links to the notorious Young Americans for Freedom. (The acronym "YAF" keeps coming up in the strangest damned places -- even when you look deeply into the JFK assassination!)

Mann was one of Dan Quayle's handlers during the latter's senate run in 1980. The wealthy Quayle/Pulliam family, which owns a chain of newspapers, has long been linked to far-right causes, and even to the CIA and FBI.

This "Fred Mann" may be the same as the Mann who participated heavily in the controversy over the TWA 800 downing. Mann's name came up -- I'm not sure in what context -- during a bizarre conclave on the mystery, described here. This meeting attracted many far-right big-wigs, who tried to paint of picture of Bill Clinton as the conspiratorial mastermind behind the terrorist incident. Attendees included reactionary conspiracy peddler Reed Irvine and Admiral Thomas Moorer. As mentioned in our "Deep Throat" posts, Moorer -- during the Nixon administration -- led a ring of military spies determined to get the goods on Henry Kissinger, whom they viewed as a Soviet penetration agent.