After working for Lewis, both men went on to long, successful careers as writers and editors at another conservative media bastion, the Reader's Digest, which the National Review recently dubbed "the quintessential magazine of 'red-state' America." The type of journalism practiced at Reader's Digest also raises questions about whether Tomlinson and Schulz are the best people to police for broadcasting bias.

Says Moyers of Tomlinson, "He seems happiest only in the circles of people who dis liberals."

During an interview with NPR that aired last week, Tomlinson defended his move to add more conservative programs to public broadcasting's lineup, stressing, "It's important to have voices in journalism coming from different directions." He added, "The reason why we view [PBS's] Jim Lehrer as such a balanced and fair journalist is because he gives no apparent indication of bringing a political point of view to the table."

Tomlinson's hunger for newsroom diversity and straight-down-the-middle objectivity appears to be a newfound one, because there certainly was none of either on the Lewis broadcast or during Tomlinson's time at Reader's Digest, a magazine famous for its undiluted Republican voice.

"The magazine spent half a century advocating a strong Republican line," says John Heidenry, who wrote the definitive history of the publication, "Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader's Digest." He notes that during the '50s, '60s and '70s, Reader's Digest's advocacy brand of pro-government journalism served as a dependable platform for the FBI as well as the CIA.

In the '70s, an internal attempt to broaden the magazine's political perspective from far right to moderately conservative sparked a civil war between the magazine's two fiefdoms -- or, as Heidenry puts it, "between the moderately conservative Pleasantville [N.Y.] office and the very right-wing, loose-cannon Washington bureau."

At the time, Schulz was running the D.C. bureau. As Heidenry describes it in his book, "Though cynical about the Digest's grind-it-out conservatism, he kept an autographed photograph of Joe McCarthy in his home and claimed that the Wisconsin senator was a very misunderstood man."

According to Heidenry, Schulz's D.C. bureau routinely tried to kill articles that strayed from the magazine's traditional far-right agenda. Additionally, the bureau, anxious to play up Cold War fears, interviewed defectors from Russia but sometimes fabricated the details of their tales. "So the whole concept of fact checking was moot," Heidenry told Salon in an interview. "They created their own facts. The Washington bureau certainly did not practice an objective type of journalism."

Tomlinson and Schulz's overseeing a drive to correct partisan journalism in public broadcasting, Heidenry says, is "the pot calling the kettle black."

According to the Ombudsman Association's code of ethics, an ombudsman is a "designated neutral" who "strives for objectivity and impartiality." Yet much of Schulz's work for Reader's Digest was precisely the type of loaded, often alarmist and partisan reporting that he's now supposed to stamp out at PBS and National Public Radio.

In early 1968, Schulz previewed a planned march on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr. The article, leaning heavily on unsourced quotes from Republican government officials, painted a bleak picture of the demonstration, all but predicting violence in the streets. Schulz appeared to be mostly concerned about America's image overseas, writing, "One thing is certain: whether or not all of the protesters' plans materialize, the nation faces international humiliation as a result of the Washington campaign. Communism's worldwide propaganda apparatus is set for a field day." (Schulz's article on King appeared in the Digest's April 1968 issue, the same month King was assassinated.)

Later that year, in the August issue, Schulz, attacking welfare, charged that in California "able-bodied hippies were financing communes with welfare checks." And in a 1969 article, he sounded a similar alarm over student protesters, insisting they "posed a major threat to the continued existence of our democratic system."

Luckily for Schulz and Tomlinson, neither Reader's Digest nor Fulton Lewis ever employed an ombudsman to check for fairness and balance.

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