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More Bad News: Bill Moyers to Leave Weekly Television
Elizabeth Jensen at the New York Times' MediaCoder blog is reporting tonight:
The PBS mainstay Bill Moyers said he is retiring from weekly television and will end his Friday night public affairs show "Bill Moyers Journal" on April 30, 2010. That date will also be the last for "Now on PBS," which has been canceled.
Mr. Moyers said he had been planning for some time to retire the program on Dec. 25, but was asked by PBS to raise the funds to continue through April, which he did.
"I am 75 years old," he said of the decision to end the series, which began in April 2007. The program has recently been having a "good run of it," he added in a telephone interview on Friday, "so I feel it's time." He said he is not quitting television work, although he has no new projects planned.
"Now" began in January 2002, and was originally hosted by Mr. Moyers. John Siceloff, the executive producer, said the program, currently hosted by David Brancaccio, has been "a unique voice at a time when outlets for insightful journalism are diminishing. We're all looking for places to continue that work."
PBS said in a statement that it is in the middle of a "review and reinvention" of its news and public affairs programming, and will announce plans for its lineup in January.
45 Comments so far
Show AllIf by "review and reinvention", they mean take a turn to the right (and NOT to the hard left)... time to cancel my PBS contributions.
Except for Bill Moyers, and a program here or there, PBS as a check on the powerful has been a dead issue for a long time. Republicrats have seen to that.
God bless you, Mister Moyers.
We, in the community who still believe in a government of, by and for the people, will miss you.
God bless.
Yes, and If anyone wonders what kind of "insightful journalism" they will happen to come up with, look for an insightful hour hosted by Charles Krauthammer or the like.
Ugly.
Sure wish we could cancel the PBS contirbutions made by the fat cats that are coming to own the network.
With this transition, I humbly suggest a change of name to PB-BS. or PO-BS for Privately Owned BS.
For simplicity's sake, they're planning to just drop the 'P'.
Ihope the "reinvention includes a cancellation of the Snooze Hour with Jim Lehrer--what a bunch of foundation and corporate prostitutes that operation has become.
Poet
Absolutely.
Let's hope someone picks up the vacancy....someone like Laura Flanders!!!
The Moyers program represents a rare spot of honest journalism. Bill you will be much missed.
Bill Moyers and NOW have been my two favorite programs on all TV for quite a while. While there are still some good things on KQED, like Frontline, Nature, Austin City Limits, etc., I think I will be spending more time on KCSM, which is obviously less corporation controlled and much more independent. This is a great disappointment to me, but I wish Bill some well deserved time off.
'Frontline' has become pretty much another spin factory for the MIC/status quo. Their coverage of 9/11 and "terrorism", the bailout/economic "crisis", even Iraq and A'stan - all leave much to be desired. Many of those programs could have been aired on MSNBC or CNN and you wouldn't have known the difference, except for commercial interruptions.
Bill Moyers will be hard to replace, and I doubt the PBS corporate sponsors would want it. But then, a Friday night - 9 p.m. time slot is not exactly great exposure to the masses either.
What PBS and Frontline ought to be doing are shows with subject matter like Jesse Ventura has done that will be first aired on truTV, Dec. 2nd./10 p.m. Eastern, and every Wednesday thereafter for 7 weeks. "Conspiracy Theories With Jesse Ventura".
IF they actually get broadcast.
Someone over at HuffPo mentioned Brancaccio as a replacement, which I was thinking of just before I saw the comment. I've been hooked on this guy ever since I his days on PRI's Marketplace, another program that is far more open and noticeably less corporate-owned than NPR. I met him once at a free seminar sponsored by WSHU in Port Jefferson.
But I am going to miss Bill Moyers terribly. This was the first headline I saw this evening and I felt my heart sink.
Thanks for this article Craig, and for all you keep doing as CD editor.
I will miss Moyers a lot. He's had quite a few very bright progressive guests on his show, Glenn Greenwald and William Greider, for example. I wish Brancaccio would have kept NOW going. We'll just have to see what PBS does as a replacement for progressive news. I'd love it if they'd bring on Amy Goodman's Democracy as a replacement. DN could use that kind of national, broadcast audience.
At 75 Bill certainly deserves whatever retirement he chooses, but will be sorely missed.
His quiet style of drawing out his guest without directing attention to himself is something that is rare in TV journalism. Surprisingly he comes from Texas yet has the manners of a Southern gentleman, a rare quality these days.
Call me an unrealistic dreamer -- but my first thought was that maybe this would free Bill up to run for president in 2012. God, who would I rather have lead the country?
Thanks Craig for notifying us about the last man of integrity on the boob tube. I long since turned it off in favor of the net.
Maybe you could invite Bill to do articles over here? What about video clips? It would suit me just fine if after the newspapers die, the TV succumbs as well to websites like CD.
Best Wishes
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
my heart is broken. this is truly the only show i value on television.
my heart is broken. truly the only show i value or worth watching on television. who now will speak the truth?
I too will miss Bill Moyers. His last broadcast airing Lyndon Johnson's taped conversations on whether to escalate the Vietnam war was illuminating.
But we still have Amy Goodman.
Joe
We MUST direct everyone we can to Democracy Now and Common Dreams, even if we have to handcuff them!
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Newspapers are dying and taking most original reporting in this country with them. When one 150 year old newspaper died recently in Colorado the local public TV station started discussing how to solicit public funding for investigative reporting to help fill the void. Hardly enough. But the void in American hard news and honest and courageous investigative reporting corresponds to the self-centered intellectual void of so many of the Amurkan people who prefer sugar-coated fairy tales, simple slogans for simple minds and other cultural opiates like pro football.
The last time PBS tried to become more "fair and balanced" they shifted to the Right and created pundit circle-jerks with some of the most inane, inexperienced Newtzi/neo-con gimps on the air. These shows plummeted in ratings and most of the right-wingers on them have disappeared into obscurity. No doubt they'll try this again. Why? Just look at their list of sponsors added since 2005. The greenwash alone could gag a boy scout jamboree.
The News Hour with Jim Lehrer is mostly a colossal waste of time now and their economics reporting is only trustworthy when Paul Solman (their longtime economics reporter) does a segment. But for several years now they have been reducing his air time and throwing the economics segments to political reporters basically repeating establishment BS from a two dimensional perspective.
Lehrer's personal interviews of heavy hitters are spotty at best. He was really on point going after Attorney General Eric Holder recently. Hit him hard over and over again. If only he'd shown the same professionalism and guts when dealing with Alberto Gonzalez and Dick Cheney. Lehrer really revealed what a wimp-to-the-core he is during the Bush/Cheney Junta. He never had any balls when it came to interviewing serial traitor/MIC errand boy Collin Powell, either.
None of the octogenarian and septuagenerian blue-hairs who dominate the News Hour, CBS 60 Minutes or Moyer's programs have groomed a sufficient number of successors to take their place in the sense of doing the best quality of work that they did when they were at their peak. There will never be another Don Hewitt or Walter Cronkite. Look at the complete non-entities who host the nightly network news these days. Uggh!
Most Americans have never and will never hear of Amy Goodman, but they consider former Nixon speech writer and celebrity interviewer/aging blonde bimbette Diane Sawyer a deeply respected journalist.
We're all gonna miss Bill Moyers but this bound to come up sooner or later. Here lies the weakness of the progressives and liberals. Unlike the conservatives, nobody is being trained to take after a great figure. Look at the conservatives. Even as Rush Limbaugh is slowly losing his dominance over the years, Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and now Beck are younger ones stepping in to replace him. Who's gonna step in for Nader, Moyers, and such wonderful progressive seniors? Face it. They're are in their 70s and they aren't immortal. We need young blood for the progressives but it's lacking and the progressives and liberals will continue to be losers until that fundamental weakness is corrected. No offense but I don't think Bill Moyers wants us to give him a funeral. Even Obama had the brains to see that if he had waited until he was older, young people wouldn't have bothered to put him over the top by the time he would have run not counting his growing "centrism" of course. I think it's time to see who can find a young suitable replacement for Moyers so that young progressives/liberals out there will be motivated to revive the progressive movement.
Bring America Back !!!!
******Excuse me, Max, but we Progs thought we had found our Man of Change in Barak Obama--and we backed him right to the White House !!! No need for a Nader or a
Moyers to plead our case if Obama would've fulfilled even 1 percent of his campaign promises !! He was the only one who voted AGAINST the Wars , you'll recall !!
***So, who knew Team Obama would deliver us the Third Term of King George and
Prince Dick ????????? We had no need to groom some Young Turks to replace our
aging documentarians, until Now, of course!
***But no need to groom Dennis Kucinich, if we could Switcharoo I would immediately replace Barak Obama with Dennis===alive, well and ready to go !!!!!!!!!
KUCINICH FOR PRESIDENT ===== WAKE UP AMERICA ===== WE WILL NEVER FORGET
I very reluctantly voted for Obama on the last minute but he turned out worse than we expected. But that's where the problem lies at. We rely on one man at the top of the pyramind. With our side, it's basically just a matter of ignoring our Congressional elections not to mention our local and state elections. I'd love to replace Obama with Kucinich too but it ain't enough. Remember what happened when FDR passed away all of a sudden? Without FDR, it was all doom and gloom and thanks to weak unity and weak passing of progressive values down to future generations, we progressives and liberals ended up being pathetic losers that we are today. I'll miss Moyers too but now that our side is pathetically unprepared to put in a young replacement for Moyers, it's another loss for our losing side.
Jeevee
RIGHT! ESPECIALLY, KUCINICH FOR PRESIDENT! WHO ELSE REALLY TELLS THE TRUTH, AMONG POSSIBLE ELECTORATES?
In regards to the posit that there are no young progressives out there, that is not so. To whit, I suggest you check out www.theyoungturks.com. They are brash, entertaining, and all under 40. While they are online instead of the corporate airwaves (which is not surprising given their political stance), they present a media savvy show that is quite humorous.
I think I heard of them before. Trouble is, they only attack the Republicans but never go on the offensive with the progressive ideology. I don't mind the humour of those guys but the real stuff has to come sooner or later.
There are many others as well, though I don't know about the under-40 proviso. Glen Greenwald comes immediately to mind. Here's a REAL Constitutional lawyer who tells it like it is about both the right and left, does impeccable, exhaustive research, and, like Moyers, seems to be a very decent fellow. Also, how about Matt Tiabbi, he of the goldman sachs expose in Rolling Stone a few months ago.
There are many other progressive voices out there. The problem is not the lack of progressive journalists (though more, many more, would be a wonderful thing for democracy), but the lack of a platform for them. And I think the demise of Moyers' show and PBS 'revaluating' its news department shows how much less of a platform true journalism will have in the future. The saddest part is, this is no surprise at all.
Bill, say it ain't so!
But if Bill really is leaving the air in just a matter of a few months, we need someone to step up and take his place with a similar program. It has to be someone with Bill's range of knowledge and insight -- and at least a modicum of his experience. How about Amy Goodman or Thomas Frank?
Ideally, someone with Bill's political "insider" experience combined with his ability to critize, should be the goal; say, is Robert Reich available?
Yea, the difference between Bill's work and what appears on Newshour was just amazing. Anybody remember "Bizarro Superman"? Completely opposite, parallel universes. I understand Bill's position. His style has been has been a sort of thunderstruck amazement- "how could such circumstances so contrary to what I thought was the essence of our great Democracy receive so little attention in the media?" Not one to hang out the window and scream "I'm not going to take it any more." He's a gentle man, knows when to bow without a lot of useless recrimination and to protect his legacy of civility. " Teeth gnashing" is not really necessary anyway. In the end the neo-liberal tower of Babel is going to fall on its own demerits.
Furthermore, there is the problem of "issue-alliance". Issues on the extreme left and right, say the Marxist theory of Antonio Gramsci and William Pierce of the National Alliance ("The Turner Diaries") tend to converge. It's hard to see what the consequences of this are going to be, one is in great danger of aiding and abetting the enemy despite the best of intentions. Better to spend one's twilight years engrossed in Philosophy or the Arts.
With respect to my last point, which might be very dificult for people to grasp, I would suggest Leonard Zeskind's new book "Blood and Politics; The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream." For all PBS's faults, at least they don't have Pat Buchanon as a regular panelist.
As an example of the difficulties of "issue convergence", look at the way some of Hugo Chavez's statements have raised criticism for anti-semitism. On the other hand, some fairly prominent rabbi's have been involved in, for example, Southern Citizen's Council's, which for being too closely associated (raising the Confederate flag, bashing the 14th Amendment) with which Trent Lott finally had to resign his leadership position in the Senate. Even the so-called liberals in Vermont have been pushing State's Rights issues in connection with re-licensing its nuclear power plant. Another example might be the extent to which both Harry Reid and Joe Lieberman have had their campaigns financed by some of the most extreme anti-castro groups in Florida. Or the way Joe Biden was ahead of George Bush in pushing for an invasion of Iraq. Under these kinds of circumstances just the fact that Obama can maintain a civil tone and not precipitate violent opposition from both sides of the political spectrum is tantamount to a miracle.
And he didn't make a sickly sweet reference to god. He really will be missed.
This is the worst news I've heard in a really long time. We desperately need Mr. Moyer's voice. Oh boy~ he will be sorely missed.
I'm so going to miss Bill Moyer, and David Brancaccio.
Maybe PBS's "review and reinvention" means gearing up for 2010 and 1012 in what the extreme-right believes is going to be their final takeover of the country. Imagine the headline: "SARAH PALIN TO TAKE OVER SPOT VACATED BY BILL MOYER'S WEEKLY JOURNAL" Of course Sarah would much prefer the daily ABC spot that Ophra's retirement will leave, but hey, PBS is good for a start. She can always walk out on it if the goin' gets tough, or something better comes along - like the Presidency of the United States.
It's a shame that the venerable Moyers is ending his television program. Unfortunately, Moyers is a relic from an era when journalists with critical-thinking skills were a valuable item. With the he-said, she-said journalism commonplace in today's 24-hour cable news, Moyers's skills are no longer appreciated. After all, it's about entertainment and ratings for the dumbed-down Amerikkkan public.
Please, Mr. Moyers, continue to write and inform. You are one of democracy's greatest assets.
Jeevee
AN EXCELLENT REASON TO GET RID OF TV.
ONE CANNOT HELP WONDERING HOW MANY CRIMINALS HAVE BEEN CREATED BY TV.
Bill's been telling the truth . . . because he's 75 and ready to retire.
No one who wants a career in MSM will dare oppose the party line.
Isn't that the way of it? Just at a time when people need a reliable source for information and with the way of msm 'informatizing' that what is needed has to be lessened by that old master, AGE. I have seen too many others in my life that are well suited to replace moyers, and who knows, maybe from time to time he will spring up with a special ever now and again.
Charles Lewis is one, if he would. Scott Ritter is another, even if he is 'young'.
This just sucks. The only two programs that deal with some semblance of the truth. Oh well, at least we'll still have Washington Week and The McLaughlin Group on Fridays (kidding).
matthew loughran
yes i agree this sucks. now pbs viewers will be stuck with the screamers (mclaughlin group) and right wing a holes on washington week. very right wing, very loud and very ignorant. boy more great journalism and its on pbs. pbs really needs to get its act together or they will have fewer and fewer people watching. they don't need more right wing a holes on there.
Bill Moyers is a good man. He has, in every way he could, warned us that the elite do not listen unless we make them listen. I hope he blogs with both barrels like he did before he got on PBS. He won't be as restrained on a BLOG.
PBS is being transformed to shape public opinion for the next election. PBS has suffered a corporate fascist takeover that we have to pay for.
Also, expect Amy Goodman to be muzzled soon.
"Hungry people and jobless people are the stuff of dictatorships" FDR
Sad.
The only voice of moderation on the MSM, I do not consider Moyers as a lefty, but rather a moderate voice. Many of his viewpooints can be considered progressive (relative to the mainsrteam discourse) however he is a moderate compared with folks like Zinn, Chomsky, Pilger, Hedges (all of whom are censored from PBS).
PBS can now be considered a fully Conservative network, now that the only moderate is leaving.
This PBS program was made possible by:
Monsanto
Chevron
Lockheed-Martin
Archer Daniels Midland
Exxon-Mobil
and by: gullible peons like you, thank you.