NYT: Moyers Leaves a Public Affairs Pulpit With Sermons to Spare [View All]

Moyers Leaves a Public Affairs Pulpit With Sermons to Spare
By DAVID CARR

Published: December 17, 2004


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."... (Moyers served as Johnson's special assistant and press secretary.)


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/17/arts/television/17moye.html