I'd take his comments as not supporting a Moon hoax.
That's the impression I got too, since he clearly means to contrast it with the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory in certain respects.
The problem is that in his haste to draw the contrast, he's misstated the historical, governmental, and scientific underpinnings of Apollo. Congress investigated NASA a number of times during the Apollo era, especially after Apollos 1 and 13, and the astronauts themselves after the Apollo 15 stamp incident. The U.S. Senate's investigation into Apollo 1 was particularly scathing, with some members of the committee accusing NASA outright of being callous, evasive, mercenary, and patronizing. Believe me, if there were any skeletons in NASA's closet, the Senate would have found them. And there were, and they did, in the form of Gen. Sam Phillips' unfavorable review of North American Aviation, one of the prime contractors. Ultimately the report was put back into proper context, but history does
not recount that Congress simply left NASA to their own devices.
As for "blue ribbon panels," the entire western aerospace community participated in Apollo development. In addition to the work done directly by NASA and its contractors, the professional journals and conferences at the time were largely concerned with exploring concepts that might apply to Apollo. The myth persists that Apollo was built and operated in secret. And there was still debate in the industry over the propriety of NASA's operations right up until the end.
Jango is right about the media attention. There just isn't any. The closest thing to a journalistic treatment of the hoax theory was Bruce Nash's program that aired on Fox in about 2001. (Nash is the producer of
Modern Marvels.) Both Nash and Fox got a pretty black eye for it. Because Fox News and Fox Entertainment were completely separate companies at the time, who just happened to share a broadcast channel, it was pretty funny to watch Fox News debunking a program that had aired on their own network. As penance, Fox Home Video took over distribution of Spacecraft Films products, an education production house that restores and packages the NASA film and video archives.
NASA hired journalist Jim Oberg to write a rebuttal to the hoax theories and paid him an advance of $15,000 to do it. I think it was ABC news who got wind of this and reported it, whereupon the public backlash was so outspoken against NASA for wasting taxpayer dollars on such nonsense that NASA canceled Oberg's contract. Last I spoke to Oberg about it, he was going to write the book anyway for a different publisher. But this was several years ago and the book has not come forth. Hence I suspect he's abandoned the project.