Thomas also had the integrity to refuse to allow her name and reputation to be used by South Korean theocrat (and right-wing funder) Sun Myung Moon when he took over United Press International in 2000. Then the best-known journalist at UPI, she resigned as an act of principle.
Though Moon was a notorious propagandist who had founded the Washington Times in 1982 as a vehicle for supporting some American politicians (such as Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush) and for tearing down others (such as John Kerry, Bill Clinton and Al Gore), much of the "objective" Washington press corps tolerated and even promoted Moon's curious newspaper.
In the mid-1980s, after Moon's newspaper signed up for the Associated Press wire service, AP executives told AP staffers, including me, that we were no longer allowed to mention Moon's connection to the newspaper when we cited the Washington Times' reporting in AP copy. That policy change meant that readers of AP stories around the world wouldn't be alerted to the propaganda element of Moon's operation.
Other respected Washington news figures, such as C-SPAN's Brian Lamb, actively promoted Moon's newspaper by hoisting up its articles before viewers, many of whom had no idea that the Times' owner was a religious cult leader with mysterious ties to foreign intelligence services and to international crime syndicates. [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
So, while Moon's newspaper was influencing the U.S. political debate with propagandistic articles -- and while Moon was spreading around money for political and journalism conferences -- Helen Thomas was one of the few prominent figures in the Washington press corps to object. (After resigning from UPI, she took a job as a columnist for the Hearst newspapers.)
Nevertheless, at the end of her long and ground-breaking career as one of the first women to operate in the male-dominated Washington press corps, Helen Thomas was the one pilloried as crazy and unprofessional by the arbiter of all that is good in journalism, Howard Kurtz.
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