Posted on 05/01/2010 11:42:25 AM PDT by Drango
Journalist Bill Moyers retires from PBS and his weekly show, the Bill Moyers Journal, on Friday. In honor of the public broadcasting legend, Fresh Air is rebroadcasting segments from several Moyers appearances over the years, including conversations about his time in the Johnson administration and his thoughts on religion, war and the future of journalism.
Moyers, who has spent the past 40 years in broadcast journalism, started working for Lyndon B. Johnson in 1954, after writing the then-Senate majority leader a letter. He would later serve as a special assistant and a press secretary to the president.
Moyers left the Johnson administration in 1967 to work for the Long Island, N.Y., daily newspaper Newsday. For the next three years, Moyers published the newspaper, which won two Pulitzer prizes during his tenure.
In 1971, Moyers left Newsday for PBS, where he began hosting his flagship show, Bill Moyers Journal. The weekly public affairs show ran on and off until 1981, when Moyers became a senior news analyst for the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Moyers returned to PBS to host NOW with Bill Moyers in 2002, and in 2007 relaunched Bill Moyers Journal with an episode that criticized journalists for failing to question the Bush administration in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In an interview at the time, Moyers told Terry Gross that his service in the Johnson administration helped him keep a critical eye on the reasons America had gone to war.
"You have to remember that I was there in the '60s in the early days of Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam, and we made so many of the mistakes that the Bush administration began to repeat after 9/11 that I had a strong sense of deja vu," Moyers said. "And the fact that I had come out of an administration that had misread intelligence, that had leaped to premature judgments, that had gone to war on a suspicion, made me much more skeptical, I think, than anybody else. I mean, like a veteran of a war, I am more skeptical ... of what war really is than somebody that hasn't been. So I felt our obligation — that our mission as journalists at that time was to challenge authority. It was not to take the president at his word. It was to ask the questions that a country needs to know before it sends its men and women into combat."
Moyers has received more than 30 Emmy awards and nine Peabodys during his career. His other shows have included The Power of Myth and Faith and Reason. He is the author of several books, including Moyers on America, a collection of his essays and speeches.
Moyers had a checkered history as an LBJ aide.
He’s also famous for having called three times within one hour to be sure that the bubble top would not be on JFK’s limo during the ride through Dallas.
(I make no comment on why he should have been so interested in being sure the top was not there...)
Yeah but Free Republic moderators will let you call him what he is, a Liberal Marxist brain dead idiot.
Good riddance!
Hope I never have to see or hear that anti-American POS again as long as I live.
This single comment tells you every single thing you need to know about Moyers and his career.
I was there in the '60s in the early days of Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam, and we made so many of the mistakes that the Bush administration began to repeat after 9/11 that I had a strong sense of deja vu," Moyers said. "And the fact that I had come out of an administration that had misread intelligence, that had leaped to premature judgments, that had gone to war on a suspicion, made me much more skeptical, I think, than anybody else.
You mean fundamental mistakes like letting up on the bombing because of peace talks, or directing air strikes from the Oval Office, or using conscripted troops? Something like that - except those were Johnson's mistakes, not Bush's?
Moyers has received more than 30 Emmy awards and nine Peabodys during his career.
Which tells you all you need to know about the Peabody and Emmy awards.
I hope Judith Miller gets to have a lot of time to comment on his retirement.
Isn’t he like Al gore?
A failed divinity student
I hate that smarmy POS and am ashamed he is from Texas. I hope he stays far away from here.
He never met a fact he couldn’t twist
Is he retiring again? How many times does this make?
Praise the Lord!
Is he the one who also told the two Secret Service agents, riding on the back of JFK’s car, to get off?
roll in the commie clone for Nationalist Socialist Radio...
Pray for America
One of the truly all-time great liberal knuckleheads...
“Norma Desmond? I thought she was dead.”
He won won Peabody prizes but no Sherman prizes. The Peabody prize was for inventing the “way back machine” which takes a liberal’s mind back to the 60s and leaves it there.
I thought he was deceased.
I can understand why you'd think that, watching his broadcasts.
...as well as a total bore.
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