Bill Moyers: Encyclopedia - Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers

William Daniel Moyers (born June 5, 1934) is an American journalist and public commentator.

He was born in Hugo, Oklahoma and was raised in Texas. Moyers began his journalism career at age 16 as a cub reporter at the Marshall News Messenger in Marshall, Texas. He and his wife, Judith Davidson Moyers, have three grown children and five grandchildren. He is currently president of The Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, Inc.

Bill Moyers - Early life

Bill Moyers studied journalism at North Texas University. In 1954, he worked as a summer intern for Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, eventually being in charge of Johnson's personal mail before his internship was finished. Moyers to transfer to the University of Texas at Austin. While in Austin, Moyers worked as an assistant to the news editor for KTBC Radio and Television, a station owned by Lady Bird Johnson. In 1957, he received a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. He joined as special assistant to Lyndon Johnson during Vice Presidental campaign in 1960.

Bill Moyers - Public service

During the Kennedy Administration, Moyers was appointed as Deputy Director of the Peace Corps (1961–63). When Lyndon Baines Johnson took office after the Kennedy assassination, Moyers became special Assistant to President Johnson and also served as White House Press Secretary from 1965 to 1967. A grassroots campaign to Draft Bill Moyers for President is collecting 100,000 signatures to ask Moyers to run for the Presidency in 2008.

Bill Moyers - Journalism

Best known for his work as a journalist, Moyers has been awarded over thirty Emmys and every other major television journalism prize, including a gold baton from the Dupont Journalism awards and a lifetime Peabody award. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He served as publisher for the Long Island, New York daily Newsday from 1967 to 1970.

In 1972, he began working for the PBS network in the public area of New York to start hosting a news program called Bill Moyers' Journal, which ran for almost four years until 1976.

In 1986, Moyers and his wife Judith Davidson formed Public Affairs Television. One of their first productions was the popular PBS series Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth (1988).

Moyers hosted the TV newsjournal, NOW with Bill Moyers, on PBS for three years. He retired from the program on December 17, 2004. He returned to PBS to host Wide Angle.

Bill Moyers - Criticism of Bill Moyers

Politically, Moyers is a controversial figure because he is major donor to FAIR, a group which analyzes the American media for instances of bias and which has often been accused by conservative groups of a liberal bias. Moyers' involvement with this group has led many critics, mostly conservative, to label him a liberal commentator rather than an objective journalist 1. During coverage of the 2004 presidential election, Moyers stated, "I think that if Kerry were to win this in a tight race, I think that there would be an effort to mount a coup, quite frankly. I mean that the right-wing is not going to accept it." He later said, "I'm going out telling the story that I think is the biggest story of our time: how the right-wing media has become a partisan propaganda arm of the Republican National Committee. We have an ideological press that's interested in the election of Republicans, and a mainstream press that's interested in the bottom line. Therefore, we don't have a vigilant, independent press whose interest is the American people."

In a 2003 interview with buzzflash.com, Moyers said "The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they've won... Take the paradox of Rush Limbaugh, ensconced in a Palm Beach mansion massaging the resentments across the country of white-knuckled wage earners, who are barely making ends meet in no small part because of the corporate and ideological forces for whom Rush has been a hero." He later added, "As (liberal commentator and author) Eric Alterman reports in his recent book-- a book that I'm proud to have helped make happen-- part of the red meat strategy is to attack mainstream media relentlessly, knowing that if the press is effectively intimidated, either by the accusation of liberal bias or by a reporter's own mistaken belief in the charge's validity, the institutions that conservatives revere-- corporate America, the military, organized religion, and their own ideological bastions of influence-- will be able to escape scrutiny and increase their influence over American public life with relatively no challenge" 2.

A Wall Street Journal story written by retired federal appeals Judge Laurence Silberman describes events when Silberman was acting Attorney General under President Ford. A memo written by Moyers to the FBI was reported in the media. The memo was from the 1964 campaign between President Johnson and Barry Goldwater. It directed FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover to investigate the Goldwater campaign for evidence of homosexual activity. It was sent to the FBI after Johnson aide Walter Jenkins had been arrested in a Washington men's room for his own homosexual activity. Silberman wrote that Moyers called him and claimed that the memo was a phony planted by the CIA. Silberman says he told Moyers he would investigate the matter and, if he was right, he would exonerate him publicly. At that point, Silberman contends Moyers backed off saying, "I was very young. How will I ever explain this to my children." Moyers has not commented on the Silberman story.[1]

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Bill Moyers", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki