Bill Moyers is stepping down: with serious journalism in decline, 32-year veteran is not going quietly

National Catholic Reporter, July 16, 2004 by Raymond A. Schroth

In my judgment the weakest episode was a shallow puff piece on religious participation in a Washington pro-abortion rally. In the same program Moyers and NPR announcer Bob Edwards, who has just published a book on Edward R. Murrow, agree that journalism has declined because journalists don't ask the "tough questions" anymore. But "Now" has no tough questions for the pro-abortion demonstrators--one a former nun--who say Jesus is on their side.

On D-Day weekend Moyers replayed and updated his 1989 45th anniversary documentary in which four veterans of the landing revisit the battle scenes, pour out some emotions, reflect on their lives and fight back tears. One old man who won the Congressional Medal of Honor, Jose Lopez, now 94, never told his family he was a hero. In one incandescent scene he kneels on the beach looking out across the channel, blesses himself and weeps.

PBS viewers may weep, too, because Moyers will leave just when the Bush administration, through appointees to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is pushing PBS to the right, according to Ken Auletta in the June 6 New Yorker and other sources. The corporation, originally established to protect public broadcasting from political interference and to fund local stations, now wants to offset the liberal Moyers by "balancing" him with new shows starring Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot (who appeared recently on "Now") and CNN conservative Tucker Carlson.

While PBS is committed to one more year of "Now," with David Brancaccio replacing Moyers gradually this summer and finally after the election, it will be cut to 30 minutes and operate without funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In the last chapter, written in 2000, of his recent book, Moyers says he has tried over the past year--during which he produced a series on the "culture of dying"--to imagine his own death. He wants it to be gentle, dignified, free of pain and in the company of loved ones. The experience of working on broadcasts about death did not depress him, he said.

He recently told The Philadelphia Inquirer. "When you have lived as long and fruitfully as I have, you're not afraid of what will come." But he added, "I will miss reading the papers every day."

RELATED ARTICLE: Moyers: journalists, democracy deeply linked.

Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth, NCR media columnist, interviewed Bill Movers by e-mail in mid-June.

NCR: You often mention your years in the seminary but not in much detail, How formative were they in developing your political and social philosophy? To what extent has your own theology influenced your decisions in journalism?

MOYERS: My years in the seminary were decisive for several reasons. I spent my first year at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland where I sat at the feet of some of the great divines of the time--masters of homiletics, New Testament and ecclesiastical history. It wasn't what they taught that influenced me so much as what they encouraged me to read--books in particular on the history of relations between the church and state in some of the cataclysmic periods of European history. The sort of things many people had come to America to escape.