[Swprograms] NYTimes.com Article: Moyers Leaves a Public Affairs Pulpit With Sermons to Spare

[rdcuff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

The article below from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by rdcuff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Some may find this off-topic, but Moyers's persepctive is likely of interest to those who seek views from an international angle.

Richard Cuff / Allentown, PA  USA

rdcuff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx


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Moyers Leaves a Public Affairs Pulpit With Sermons to Spare

December 17, 2004
 By DAVID CARR 



 

Bill Moyers, a preacher turned journalist who accrued 30
Emmys, has veered back to the pulpit in announcing his
retirement from "Now With Bill Moyers," a PBS weekly
newsmagazine for which he has been the host for three
years. His final broadcast tonight marks a 33-year run on
public television that has brought awards, attacks and
almost uncountable stories. 

The gospel of Mr. Moyers - an unreconstructed progressive -
warns against the danger of media consolidation, the
growing links between conservative government and
conservative media and the threat of information control by
government. 

Anybody who has paid attention to Mr. Moyers's 54-year
career in journalism would not be surprised by his
jeremiad. He is a rigorous journalist, one whose
documentaries and television news reports always point to
the facts, but when he makes up his mind, he lands hard on
his conclusions. And among other epiphanies, Mr. Moyers has
decided that the current administration in the White House
represents a threat to free and unfettered discourse. 

"The first thing that President Bush did when he came into
office was to try and deny access to his father's
presidential papers," Mr. Moyers, 70, said in a telephone
interview earlier this week from his Manhattan office. "The
attacks of 9/11 have given them a cover and a rationale to
accelerate what has been an ambitious plan to keep the
workings of government secret. They make Lyndon Johnson
seem like a piker." 

A graduate of Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary in
Fort Worth, Mr. Moyers is something of an expert on
Johnson, having served as his special assistant and press
secretary, after stints as a minister, a journalist and the
deputy director of the Peace Corps. The two had a falling
out, and Mr. Moyers went on to become publisher of Newsday.
(No one has fully explained why they had a falling out, but
the book about Johnson that Mr. Moyers said he hoped to
write once he retired from "Now" should provide some
reasons.) Mr. Moyers left Newsday in 1970 after that
newspaper was acquired by the Times Mirror Company and then
went to PBS, where he has become a ubiquitous presence. 

In an age of television shouters, Mr. Moyers is an anomaly.
His delivery is measured and the rhetoric temperate. Yet he
used the tools of the documentarian to wield a velvet
sledgehammer, bludgeoning corporate polluters and
government ne'er-do-wells with precision and grace. His
tendentiousness in choice of targets has earned him the
fealty of public-television audiences and the enmity of
conservative observers. 

FrontPageMagazine.com, a conservative Web site, published a
detailed retrospective earlier this month on Mr. Moyers,
describing him as a "sweater-wearing pundit who delivered
socialist and neo-Marxist propaganda with a soft Texas
accent." 

And Mr. Moyers has done nothing to endear himself further
as he heads for the exit, telling anyone who will listen
that "the conservative press is a propaganda wing of the
current administration and the mainstream press thinks only
of the bottom line." 

For all his political fervor, Mr. Moyers never confined his
reportorial inquiries to hard news. He is primarily
responsible for introducing Robert Bly and Joseph Campbell
to the American public; he strolled through the history of
the 20th century in a long series; and he explored the
healing power of the mind. 

Much of that work was done with Judith Davidson Moyers, his
wife of 50 years and the president of Public Affairs
Television, their documentary production company. She sees
his victory lap on behalf of causes he cares deeply about
as consistent with the rest of his career. 

"He has a lot of indignation about what is happening to
regular people," she said in a telephone interview. "We
both care a great deal about who is being left out and left
behind." 

Mr. Moyers has done more than preach, teach and write
stories. He has been president of the Schumann Center for
Media and Democracy, a New Jersey-based nonprofit that
provides grants to promote education and environmental
causes, along with financial support for media projects. 

To many people with allegiances to liberal causes, he has
been a kind of patron saint, a journalist-activist who
never let notions of objectivity get in the way of taking a
stand. 

Meryl Streep, who introduced Mr. Moyers when he accepted
the 2004 Global Environmental Citizen Award from Harvard
Medical School earlier this month, suggested that his
retirement was a calamity. 

"I took it as a natural disaster of the first order, an act
of God of the magnitude 8.1 on the Richter scale, when I
heard Bill Moyers was retiring from 'Now' on PBS after this
year," she said in her presentation. "Many people like me
have counted on Bill for what often seemed his voice crying
in the wilderness - on behalf of the wilderness - for
decades." 

But people who do not share his political views see his
body of work, however celebrated, as agitprop. And his
departing sermons are not making any new friends, including
L. Brent Bozell III, president of the Media Research
Center, a conservative media monitoring group. 

"I think that if Bill Moyers is trying to go out as the
Michael Moore of television, he ought to be congratulated,
because he has succeeded," he said. "I think he has gone
off the deep end." 

Mr. Moyers sounded as if he might have regrets about
leaving public television, however well received his
departure would be in some quarters. 

"I think this will be a golden age of investigative
journalism," he said. "When you marry the power of the
state with the power of business, as is the case with the
current administration, you are creating a spectacle of
corruption that will create a heyday for muckrakers, as
long as there are enough of them left." 

Although Mr. Moyers is nominally retiring - he and Ms.
Moyers will continue to produce documentaries - it is
doubtful he will go silent. A day after the telephone
interview from his Manhattan production studio, he sent a
draft by e-mail of his final remarks on "Now." (The
program's new host will be David Brancaccio, its current
co-host, a former host of "Marketplace" on public radio and
a man with a modern irony that Mr. Moyers never managed to
master.) In the note that accompanied the draft, Mr. Moyers
continued to circle like a warplane, pumping round after
round into its intended targets. 

"I learned the hard way an old lesson that the greatest
moments in the history of the press came not when
journalists made common cause with the state but when they
stood fearlessly independent of it," he said. "Now we have
those megamedia companies that won't speak truth to power
and an ideological media that willingly lies for power.
Scary!" 

In the uninflected medium of e-mail Mr. Moyers's departing
exclamation, not couched in his just-us-folks Texas
delivery, comes through loud and clear. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/17/arts/television/17moye.html?ex=1104292536&ei=1&en=276dc9df099d72a7


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