(The usual, full disclosure: I have been a Moyers employee in the past and contributed some ideas to the May 15 address.)

Over the last week and a half, via the New York Times, this column, and the office of North Dakota Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan, more has been learned about Fred Mann, the consultant Tomlinson hired, and the results of his research.

Mann was a Republican campaign consultant, wrote for the conservative National Review and was employed by the National Journalism Center, a Virginia-based organization that trains conservative journalists and finds them employment. It was founded by the American Conservative Union and is administered by the right wing Young America's Foundation.

Raw data Tomlinson provided Senator Dorgan's office showed that Mann was monitoring not only Moyers, but also those who appeared on shows hosted by Tavis Smiley and Diane Rehm of National Public Radio.

As New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote Sunday, “Their guests were rated either L for liberal or C for conservative, and 'anti-administration' was affixed to any segment raising questions about the Bush presidency. Thus was the conservative Republican Senator Chuck Hagel given the same L as Bill Clinton simply because he expressed doubts about Iraq in a discussion mainly devoted to praising Ronald Reagan. Three of The Washington Post's star beat reporters (none of whom covers the White House or politics or writes opinion pieces) were similarly singled out simply for doing their job as journalists by asking questions about administration policies."

Mann's job was “to assemble what smells like the rough draft of a blacklist.” Rich quoted Senator Dorgan: "It's pretty scary stuff to judge media, particularly public media, by whether it's pro or anti the president. It's unbelievable."

Unbelievable perhaps, but consistent with the ideology, tactics and past history of Kenneth Tomlinson. “This is the man who was running The Voice of America back in 1984 when a partisan named Charlie Wick was politicizing the United States Information Agency of which Voice of America was a part,” Moyers noted on May 15.

“It turned out there was a blacklist of people who had been removed from the list of prominent Americans sent abroad to lecture on behalf of America and the USIA. What's more, it was discovered that evidence as to how those people were chosen to be on the blacklist -- more than 700 documents -- had been shredded.

“Among those on the lists of journalists, writers, scholars and politicians were dangerous left wing subversives like Walter Cronkite, James Baldwin, Gary Hart, Ralph Nader, Ben Bradley, Coretta Scott King and David Brinkley. The person who took the fall for the blacklist was another right-winger. He resigned. Shortly thereafter, so did Kenneth Tomlinson, who had been one of the people in the agency with the authority to see the lists of potential speakers and allowed to strike people's names."

Tomlinson protested the accusation. In a letter to Moyers, leaked to the conservative Washington Times three days after the St. Louis speech, he wrote, “Bill, you can't make this stuff up. No one has ever linked me to any form of blacklist incident."

In fact, someone did.

In a February 21, 1984, dispatch, the Associated Press interviewed Mark W. Everson, the USIA's assistant director for management, policy and coordination, who explained that every week “a list of potential speakers was compiled within the USIA.

“That list circulated among six high officials, any one of whom could strike names.” One of them was Tomlinson.

“Let me be clear about this,” Moyers said on May 15. “There is no record, apparently, of what Ken Tomlinson did. We don't know whether he supported or protested the blacklisting of so many American liberals. Or what he thinks of it now. “

What we do know is that a record of Tomlinson's interfering with the independence of public broadcasting and “disassembling,” as President Bush would say, has been established. That no one has ever linked him to the USIA blacklist is just one of several instances: others include prevaricating about White House involvement in CPB decision-making (proven by e-mail's leaked to the Times and NPR), denying that a White House official was involved in the creation of a CPB ombudsman's office, and claiming that former CPB President Kathleen Cox had signed off on his consulting deal with Fred Mann -- it was made five months before she became president.

But it's the list-making that rings so resonantly of times past: Nixon's enemies list (including public television anchors Robert MacNeil and Sander Vanocur), Joe McCarthy's list of 205 Communists in the State Department, the movie and television blacklists of the fifties that destroyed the lives, families and careers of so many members of the creative community.

As National Journal columnist William Powers writes, “It has all started to feel like a Gilbert and Sullivan show, with Tomlinson as Lord High Executioner ('Defer, Defer, to the Lord High Executioner!') and the other cast members scurrying around him in fear and outrage."

It is, of course, that same Lord High Executioner who sings of his little list “of society offenders who might well be underground.”

I see Tomlinson as more the officious, ambitious Colonel Cathcart in Joseph Heller's “Catch 22,” the one who keeps lists of “Black Eyes” and “Feathers in My Cap” and resents the novel's hero Yossarian because there are two many “sss” sounds in his name -- like “subversive,” “seditious,” “socialist” and “suspicious."

“You're either for us or against us,” Cathcart exclaims. “There's no two ways about it.” Sounds familiar -- like the president or Tomlinson's pal Karl Rove impugning the patriotism of liberals post-9/11 -- a characterization especially resented by virtually all of us who live near Ground Zero.

Last week's landslide, bipartisan 284-104 House vote to restore $100 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's fiscal 2006 budget ran counter to the master plan. It was an impressive demonstration of the powerful pressure of which citizen support for public broadcasting is capable.

Sadly, equally vocal lobbies don't exist for rural emergency medical services and other health, education and social service programs cut by the same legislation. Nor does the bill restore $23 million for the public TV Ready to Learn program for kids or $89 million for satellite overhaul and public television's federally mandated transition to digital TV.

(There's an old, good news/bad news joke in public TV: the good news is you have partial funding, the bad news is you have partial funding.)

Senate and conference committee votes lie ahead, and on the same day as the House victory, CPB announced it had endorsed Ken Tomlinson's choice as the new president of the corporation: Assistant Secretary of State Patricia S. Harrison, a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee. A commentator in the aforementioned Washington Times once described her as “a cruise missile” who created “general havoc for the other side while advancing her party."

Initially, she's owed the benefit of the doubt, but past experience teaches us that eternal vigilance is the price not only of freedom but of Big Bird, the Newshour, All Things Considered, Frontline, NOW, P.O.V., Morning Edition, Wide Angle, et al. -- the independent, creative voices of public broadcasting that on their best days combat mediocrity and speak the truth to power.

Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York.

© 2005 Messenger Post Newspapers