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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
The conscience of American journalism speaks his mind about Bush, LBJ, Iraq, Vietnam, the triumph of America's global power and the withering of its democracy.
Apr 7, 2003 | To say that Bill Moyers is an exceptional case among former White House press secretaries is almost to damn him with faint praise. Love him or loathe him, Moyers has become one of the most recognizable and celebrated journalists in television history since leaving President Lyndon B. Johnson's staff in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War.
Some on the left have never quite forgiven Moyers for his role as the voice of LBJ's fateful Vietnam escalation, an experience he still talks about with sharp regret. But he is far better known for his subsequent work, especially his questing, long-form interviews with world leaders and deep thinkers, in the all-but-forgotten tradition of legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow. Moyers is the intellectual's version of Barbara Walters -- or rather, Walters is the celebrity-struck populist's version of him.
It's fair to say that other occupants of Moyers' old job have not become quite so prominent in later life. Most have traded on their fading celebrity to garner more or less respectable perches somewhere in the intertwining thickets of public relations, finance, law, publishing and policy-think. Jody Powell, once Jimmy Carter's press secretary, now heads a Washington P.R. firm, which is pretty much the default setting. (He deserves special credit for once having poured a glass of red wine on Sam Donaldson aboard Air Force One.) Former Clinton flack Dee Dee Myers, a professional talking head and consultant, and onetime Reagan/George H.W. Bush spokesman Marlin Fitzwater (the only press secretary appointed by two different presidents), have at least been having fun; both have worked as consultants on "The West Wing."
Gerald Ford's onetime press secretary, Ron Nessen, tried to resume his career in broadcasting. He once hosted something called "The TV Book Shop" on the Nostalgia channel, whatever that is or was. (Nessen actually has a perfectly honorable job now, directing P.R. for the Brookings Institution.) Then there's the case of former Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, who died in February. Only Reagan spokesman Larry Speakes can challenge Ziegler's supremacy as the all-time West Wing misleader and prevaricator (although don't rule out current occupant Ari Fleischer). Ziegler followed his disgraced boss into exile, and then got to find out what purgatory was like while he was still alive, spending 11 years as chief executive of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores.
It's tempting to suggest that the combination of noble ambition and tragic miscalculation that characterized the Johnson White House acted as the spur to Moyers' later journalistic career, with its blend of skepticism and open-minded search for the Big Idea. He himself says that his experience with LBJ, and his childhood in the segregated South, were the defining events of his life.
Since first going into television in 1971, Moyers has produced and hosted hundreds of hours of programming for both CBS News and PBS (exclusively for the latter since 1986). His themes have been consistently large and general: religious faith, the United States Constitution, the power of storytelling, the nature of artistic creativity, freedom vs. secrecy, addiction and recovery, death and dying, bigotry and hatred, poverty and inequality, the corruption of democracy and, pervading it all, the question of America, its history, identity and destiny. It may be easy to make fun of his endless series of interviews with the pseudo-Jungian myth-chronicler Joseph Campbell, a PBS fundraising gold mine of the '80s, but the ideas aired were actually far from juvenile and their influence on the culture was immense. (On the other hand, the less said about Moyers' special "A Gathering of Men With Robert Bly," the better.)
Rather than mellowing with age, Moyers, now 68, has arguably become the lone radical on television, openly challenging our national failure to confront fundamental issues of class, money and power. On his current magazine-style show, "NOW With Bill Moyers" (which airs Friday nights on PBS), he has the same shock of schoolboy hair -- now completely white -- and the same air of polite, bespectacled concern as ever. He still looks and sounds like the über-square Texas divinity student and ordained Baptist minister he once was.
"NOW" sometimes indulges in the wandering, sweet-natured interviews with poets and artists that have always been part of Moyers' métier, and occasional segments -- like an October tribute to a Seattle Latino community center -- seem like defiant examples of old-school political correctness. (In a media landscape dominated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly -- who has feuded publicly with Moyers -- why the hell not?)
But the program's real strength is its political and economic reporting and its ability to look beneath the surface of current events, which have always been the areas where Moyers' unquestioned intelligence is put to best use. He and his affiliated teams of reporters -- Moyers' prestige allows him to work in concert with such other journalistic institutions as National Public Radio, the New Yorker and the New York Times -- have uncovered scandalous corporate handouts hidden in "free trade" agreements, the continuing evisceration of campaign-finance reform, rebellions against privatization in Latin America, the consolidation of media ownership, the pharmaceutical industry's ad blitz and offshore tax shelters for corporate fat cats.
Although he insists he is a political independent, and not a Democrat or a "liberal," Moyers makes no secret of his contempt for the secretive crony-fest of the Bush administration (or rather both Bush administrations, which he sees as an interrupted hereditary regime), his opposition to military intervention in the Middle East and his distrust of the "corporate conservative hegemony" he believes is strangling American political life. (Somehow Moyers can say that phrase and make it sound reasonable, where you or I would come off as a raving Leninist, even if we believe it's accurate.)
I think the secret to Bill Moyers' success is not merely his benevolent, avuncular manner but his gentle, almost singsong, folksy-yet-learned delivery (which he says he absorbed from the storytelling tradition of rural East Texas, where he was raised). If his writing can occasionally seem mannered, it also has a poetic verve and grace almost unknown in television. Here's how he ended a recent broadcast, ruminating on the ancient resonance of the headline "Marines cross Euphrates":
"And on these stones is all that remain of conquests, rebellions and battles -- the violent death of rulers -- prisoners of war disposed of by execution. For 5,000 years the story repeats itself, the victory of one, the defeat of the other. Tribes and gods turn on each other. Even Genghis Khan met his match trying to get here. The last word has always been written in the sand. Cities and states lie buried beneath it. The great figures who once held sway here -- Ashurnasirpal II, Tiglath-Pileser III, Shamshi-Adad V, King Nino, Queen Semiramis, King Shar-kali-sharri, Suleyman the Magnificent, the Ottomans, the British -- have all been carried away. Five thousand years from now, who will be crossing the Euphrates? What will remain from our time? And what will be remembered?"
Without much hope of answering these questions, I recently joined Moyers for a chat in the sixth-floor office at WNET in New York where he and his wife of 49 years, Judith Davidson Moyers, run their production company, Public Affairs Television. His bookcases are stacked with Emmy Awards, although, in fairness, only a dozen or so of the 30-plus he has won seem to be on display. Wearing a rumpled Ralph Lauren dress shirt, he sat down opposite me, offered me a Diet Coke, and began to ask probing, Moyers-esque questions about me and about Salon. Eventually, however, I got him to move on to other topics: the state of journalism today, radical Islam and globalization, and the failing health of American democracy.
When you look around at American journalism right now, how are we doing on reporting the war in Iraq and its repercussions around the world?
If you look hard enough, you can find a variety of information and insight. But you have to look hard, you have to create your own kaleidoscope. That's what I think is both exhausting all of us and confusing all of us. If you watch the BBC you'll get a different approach from any of the American networks. But you have to watch those American networks in order to judge the BBC.
Then you have to turn to the Internet and the alternative press. It does seem to be a constantly turning kaleidoscope. If you keep turning it long enough, and you get the right angle so the light's just right, you get a good sense of the whole. But I don't know where the typical citizen, who's not working at what I work at all day -- trying to make sense of it -- turns to get an overview.
You have to watch Al-Jazeera, which I do here. You have to read Romenesko and you have to read the BBC Web site and the Washington Post, all of it. It's a full-time job, editing your own virtual newspaper every day. I go to Editor & Publisher, and I find help from their coverage of the media coverage. I go to some of the committed, ideological Web sites, whether it's Brent Bozell on the right or FAIR [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] on the left. I compose my own front page every day, and my own arts section and my own war coverage.
For a professional journalist, it's media heaven. But for the typical citizen, it must be very confusing. For those who settle on one thing, for those who settle on Fox News, where journalism becomes nationalism becomes chauvinism, if that's the only place you're getting information, you're not going to have any overall view. You have to work at it. It puts a great burden on the citizen. But the alternative is to have just three networks, as we did once upon a time.
My impression is that the buildup to the war, and the first few weeks of the war, were all driven by the government's mission and the government's definition of what is news. Most of us were letting the official view of reality set our agenda. As the war has gone on and news has happened out there, we're beginning to get more important pieces, pieces that are much at odds with the official view of reality.
Do you think the major news institutions that most of us rely on -- the Big Three networks, CNN, the New York Times -- are beginning to do independent reporting, rather than just reacting to the government view of events?
I don't think they're reporting independently, no. I think what's happening is that other people are reacting to the government and they're able to justify what they're doing by reporting on what those other people are saying and doing that is at odds with the government. I don't think there's a lot of independent, entrepreneurial journalism which says, let's really ask if Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations is accurate or not. Once somebody does that -- an independent journalist in Britain gets on the Internet and tracks down that graduate student who wrote the heart of that piece 12 years ago -- everybody else picks it up. But I don't find the big, mainstream organizations doing entrepreneurial journalism. They accept the official version of reality, although I guess they accept it skeptically. They take it, play it and then hope somebody else challenges it so they can then say, "There's a debate about this."
How do you feel about "embedded reporters," a phrase that's now, I guess a permanent entry in the journalistic lexicon?
It's not as good as what we did in the Vietnam War. Remember, I was in the Johnson White House at that time. We made a very conscious decision that reporters were to go where they wanted to go. Sometimes they had to go with the military because there was no other way to get there. But Johnson was actually presented with a recommendation from the Pentagon -- we didn't think to call it "embedded," but it would have created the same situation. He said we shouldn't put that kind of limit on them. He railed against the press! He loathed the press, when they reported information that was at odds with him. But it was an important moment in journalistic history, because we didn't try to manage the press. We challenged the press, and we would snipe at the press, but we didn't try to manage the press.
Of course things got worse after that: the incursions in Panama and Grenada, and Gulf War I. It was total censorship. So this is an improvement over what has been happening. But it's not as good as Vietnam, where reporters had total and unrestricted access. Morley Safer was out there filming GIs torching huts with their lighters. He wasn't embedded; he just went along. Or Peter Arnett, who was then working for A.P. out of Asia; he could go where he wanted to.
So this is an improvement, and I greatly admire the courage and bravery of people who are embedded. I wish I knew that I had that kind of courage. I mean, I've covered minor wars. I went to Central America, I went to Africa. But I've never been exposed to the kind of fire that these guys are being exposed to.
It does mean that you're seeing through the eyes of the military. That's a problem, in a sense. But it's an advantage over anything else we've seen in the last 20 to 25 years. The other disadvantage is that you see what that unit of military is seeing, and you only see that.
But I'm glad the military is doing it. Overall, it's a plus. It's better to be there (in the field) than not to be there, relying only on military briefings, which is what we got in Gulf War I.
