Bill Moyers, America's Conscience, Retires Again--This Time for Real (ICYMI)
Bill Moyers, America’s Conscience, Retires Again—This Time for Real
The PBS journalist steps down from his long-time mission to document the lives of Americans and uncover waste, fraud, and abuse in corporate America and beyond.
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“When I left the White House I had to learn that what matters in journalism is not how close you are to power, but how close you are to the truth,” (Photo: Dennis Van Tine/Geisler-Fotopres/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images)
Bill Moyers has threatened to retire several times. Each time, the many fans and friends have urged the legendary PBS journalist to reconsider, and each time he did. But today, at age 83, Moyers announced his farewell, and this time it is real. Moyers ended his celebrated PBS interview program, Moyers and Company, in 2014. Since then, he’s hosted BillMoyers.com, with original articles by Moyers and others on political topics. The website will continue to serve as the archive of the television journalism that Moyers has produced over the past 44 years.
Moyers has been one of the most prolific and influential figures in American journalism. Not content just to diagnose and document corporate and political malpractice, Moyers regularly took his cameras and microphones to cities and towns where unions, community organizations, environmental groups, tenants rights activists, and others were waging grassroots campaigns for change. Moyers gave them a voice. He used TV as a tool to expose political and corporate wrongdoing and to tell stories about ordinary people working together for justice.
He also introduced America to great thinkers, activists, and everyday heroes typically ignored by mainstream media. He produced dozens of hard-hitting investigative documentaries uncovering corporate abuse of workers and consumers, the corrupting influence of money in politics, the dangers of the religious right, conservatives' attacks on scientists over global warming, and many other topics. A gifted storyteller, Moyers' TV shows, speeches, and magazine articles have roared with a combination of outrage and decency, exposing abuse and celebrating the country's history of activism. Moyers spent most of his broadcast career on public television, whose audience is considerably smaller than that of the major networks. But his influence—through his documentaries, interviews, books, magazine articles, and speeches, with their ripple effects of his calls to conscience—has been great nonetheless. He received over thirty-five Emmy Awards (including a Lifetime Emmy), a lifetime Peabody Award, an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University award, a George Polk Career Award (his third Polk award), induction into the Television Hall of Fame, and many other honors for his contributions to journalistic integrity and investigative reporting.
Moyers came by his progressive class consciousness and moral outrage naturally. Neither of his parents went to high school. Dirt poor, they worked as farmers until they could not make it anymore because of bad weather and the boll weevil. When Moyers was born, the family lived in southeast Oklahoma, where his father was making $2 a day as a highway construction worker. When he got a job driving a creamery truck, they moved to Marshall, Texas.
On a 2008 program, Moyers recalled:
The Great Depression knocked him down and almost out, and he struggled on one pittance paying job after another, until finally, late in life, he had a crack at a union job. His last paycheck was the most he'd ever taken home in a week, $96 and change, and he was proud of it. I saw then how unions struggled to preserve the middle class, and can make the difference between earning a living wage and being part of the working poor.
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http://billmoyers.com/
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have made this country and world a better place. Many thanks Bill Moyers! Wishing you all the best in new pursuits.
