McCarthyite Watchdog

I would imagine that most people have heard of Walter Winchell, the McCarthyite radio commentator and newspaper columnist. Fewer of you have probably heard of another influential McCarthyite radio commentator and newspaper columnist of the period, Fulton Lewis Jr. But, you should probably read up on him a little bit because it’s actually going to be important in your own life right here and now:

That he was considered a controversial commentator is mostly reflected in his strong conservative stances in a time of increasing liberalism. Throughout the Roosevelt/Truman administrations, Lewis continued to defend his beliefs. In pre-war America Lewis supported and encouraged the America First stance of Charles A. Lindbergh, which espoused that America spend its money and resources on building up our own defenses and stay out of the European conflict. Lindbergh was an admirer of the military capability of National Socialist Germany.

As the medium of radio waned during the rise of television in the late forties and early fifties, Lewis’ appearance on the small screen was simply not good television. He appeared too much out of place and so he continued on radio. It was in the fifites that Lewis’ star began to wane. He was a strong supporter of Joe McCarthy, the Wisconsin Senator who presided over the committee investigating communists in the government.

That really doesn’t give you the full flavor of Lewis’s right wing hackery. He was a Drudge of his day, the happy recipient of nasty information about McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover’s enemies and targets. And unlike Winchell, who had at least been as hostile to Hitler as to Stalin, Lewis had a bit of a soft spot for Naziism, something that the liberals of the day (as they are today) were too polite to use as a weapon against his anti-communist zealotry and character assassination. Alan Ginsberg remembered Lewis speaking of the Rosenberg case:

…especially, there was one commentator on the air, called Fulton Lewis, who said that they smelt bad, and therefore should die. There was an element of anti-Semitism in it. But I remember very clearly on the radio, this guy Fulton Lewis saying they smelt bad. He was a friend of J. Edgar Hoover, who was this homosexual in the closet, who was blackmailing almost everybody.

(This “smell” thing, which Ginsberg notes is long associated with anti-semitism, is commonly used today by fine mainstream humorists and commentators like Ann Coulter to describe liberals.)

In any case, what makes Mr Fulton, long dead and mostly forgotten, important you you, my friends, is that his ghost writer for five years was none other than William Schultz, one of the new ombudsmen for the Public Broadcasting System.

I’m not kidding. The man who wrote Joe McCarthy’s stongest supporter’s newspaper column is now on the payroll of the corporation of public broadcasting as an ombudsman.

Here’s what the guy said in an interview with Rick Perlstein in 1997:

[Were you anamolous in New York?]

“well, I went to a high school where, for reasons I cannot figure out, there was a real conservative and libertarian nucleus: The Bronx High School of Science in New York. Bob Schuchman went Bronx Science, and others did who went on to positions in politics and academia. So I was not unfamiliar with it.

“As Allan said, we were journalists; Allan was, I was. I went to Antioch College in Ohio, and they had a work-study program, and I got a couple of newspaper jobs, and then I worked for Human Events, and worked for Stan Evans, who had a tremendous influence on me. Then I went to work for Fulton Lewis Jr., who was a radio commentator and columnist.

“He had a fifteen minute broadcast at seven o’clock on the Mutual Network and then a five minute broadcast at noon. And I arrived from Yellow Springs, OH, thinking I was going be his leg-man–I had never met him before–and the first thing he said was, ‘can you write a newspaper column?’ The guy who had been ghostwriting his five-day-a-week newspaper column had just went to work for Nixon getting ready for the 1960 campaign–this would have been 1959. So I said, ‘sure, I can write a newspaper column.’

“So I started ghosting his newspaper column! Then I would go back to Yellow Springs, OH every three months and write the ‘Inside Washington’ column from Yellow Springs and send it off to Washington by Western Union the time ’64 rolled around I had been writing the Lewis column for five years. So I was in San Francisco not as a delegate or an activist but as a journalist, but as one who believed fervently in Goldwater, and as I said that was the most…”

When they were out of power, the right wing insisted that public broadcasting was a commie plot and should be destroyed. It was a perennial in the GOP platform. Now that they own the government, the movement radicals of the GOP have discovered the joys of taxpayer sponsored government propaganda and they are seizing upon public broadcasting as a fine means to produce and spread it. “The Journal Editorial Report” is the likely future of Public Television. And now they have gone and appointed a real live McCarthyite as their “ombudsman.”

Media Matters has more on Schultz, and the contact numbers for him and his close personal friend Kenneth Tomlinson, the newly named Republican chairman of the corporation for Public Broadcasting who recently told members of the Association of Public Broadcasters that they should make sure their programming better reflected the Republican mandate. He later said he was joking. Except nobody laughed.

FYI, as Media Matters points out:

According to The Ombudsman Association’s code of ethics, an ombudsman is a “designated neutral” who “strives for objectivity and impartiality.”

It’s kind of hard to imagine how a Joe McCarthy fan can be considered a “designated neutral,” but then I suppose if Ann Coulter is considered good clean fun, then anything is possible.

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