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Bill Moyers Exemplified Public TV at Its Best
From his reporting on issues like the Iran-Contra scandal to his critique of corporate media, Moyers worked to hold the powerful to account and provide a voice for the unheard.
Jul 03, 2025
Bill Moyers died last week at the age of 91. His career began as a close aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson, serving as LBJ’s de facto chief of staff and then his press secretary, but Moyers spent most of his life in journalism. After the Johnson administration, he was briefly publisher of Long Island’s Newsday, which won two Pulitzers under his tenure before he was forced out for being too left (Extra!, 1–2/96).
Most of Moyers’ journalism, however, appeared on public television, an institution he helped launch as a member of the 1967 Carnegie Commission, which called for public TV to be “a forum for controversy and debate” that would “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard” and “help us see America whole, in all its diversity.”
While public TV as a whole has often failed to live up to those ideas, Moyers exemplified them.
Consistently Critical
Moyers was a consistently critical voice on PBS. In 1987, his PBS special “The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis” offered a searing examination of the Iran-Contra scandal; he followed that up with an even deeper dive into the story three years later for “Frontline” with “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Moyers’ 2007 documentary Buying the War, aired four years into the Iraq War, offered a critique of media failures in the run-up to war that was rarely heard in corporate media.
His independence made him a thorn in PBS‘ side. Robert Parry (FAIR.org, 9/13/11) explained:
When I was working at PBS “Frontline” in the early 1990s, senior producers would sometimes order up pre-ordained right-wing programs—such as a show denouncing Cuba’s Fidel Castro—to counter Republican attacks on the documentary series for programs the right didn’t like, such as Bill Moyers’ analysis of the Iran-Contra scandal.
In essence, the idea was to inject right-wing bias into some programming as “balance” to other serious journalism, which presented facts that Republicans found objectionable. That way, the producers could point to the right-wing show to prove their “objectivity” and, with luck, deter GOP assaults on PBS funding.
When Moyers hosted the news program “Now” (2002-04), the right complained—and PBS addressed the complaints by cutting the hour-long show to 30 minutes, while adding three right-wing programs: “Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered”; a show by conservative commentator Michael Medved; and the “Journal Editorial Report,“” featuring writers and editors from the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page (FAIR.org, 9/17/04).
Moyers was already heading out the door at “Now,” passing the torch to co-host David Brancaccio, who largely continued its hard-hitting tradition. Moyers returned to PBS in 2007 with a revival of his 1970s public affairs show, “Bill Moyers Journal.” When he retired that show in 2010, PBS also canceled “Now.” Moyers’ brand of independent journalism has been in short supply on PBS ever since.
Moyers diagnosed the problem in an appearance on Democracy Now! (6/8/11):
Sometimes self-censorship occurs because you’re looking over your shoulder, and you think, well, if I do this story or that story, it will hurt public broadcasting. Public broadcasting has suffered often for my sins, reporting stories the officials don’t want reported. And today, only… a very small percentage of funding for NPR and PBS comes from the government. But that accounts for a concentration of pressure and self-censorship. And only when we get a trust fund, only when the public figures out how to support us independently of a federal treasury, will we flourish as an independent medium.
‘Real Change Comes From Outside the Consensus’
Moyers shared FAIR’s critique of corporate media. On “Tavis Smiley” (5/13/11), he spoke about the elite bias in the media:
Television, including public television, rarely gives a venue to people who have refused to buy into the ruling ideology of Washington. The ruling ideology of Washington is we have two parties, they do their job, they do their job pretty well. The differences between them limit the terms of the debate. But we know that real change comes from outside the consensus. Real change comes from people making history, challenging history, dissenting, protesting, agitating, organizing.
Those voices that challenge the ruling ideology—two parties, the best of all worlds, do a pretty good job—those voices get constantly pushed back to the areas of the stage you can’t see or hear.
Jeff Cohen, FAIR’s founder, remembered Moyers’ impact on FAIR:
He was very supportive of FAIR from day one, and always offered encouragement to our staff. He was especially supportive of our studies of who gets to speak on PBS and NPR, and who doesn’t. He helped FAIR find funding for quarter-page advertorials on The New York Times op-ed page, which was then crucial and well-read media real estate, on various issues of corporate media bias or censorship. And he helped us find funding as well for a full-page ad in USA Today, exposing the distortions and lies of Rush Limbaugh.
Already some in corporate media are trying to push Moyers’ dissenting voice to the shadows. The New York Times (6/26/25), in a lengthy obituary devoted mostly to Moyers’ time working with LBJ, found no room to mention Moyers’ Iran-Contra work, or his repeated clashes with and criticisms of PBS. It did, however, find space to quote far-right website FrontPageMag.com, which in 2004 called Moyers a “sweater-wearing pundit who delivered socialist and neo-Marxist propaganda with a soft Texas accent.”
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How to Use 197 Forbidden 'Woke' Words and Still Get a Grant From the Trump-Musk Government
A grant proposal concerning reparations for the descendants of slave owners, submitted in good faith to Elon Musk during this cruel and unusual time of oppressive wokeness.
Mar 27, 2025
Dear Elon,
On behalf of the Diversified Organization of Grant Enablers, (the original DOGE), thank you for ordering the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation to flag proposals that contain certain oppressive “woke” words you don’t like. We’re not wild about them either.
Forbes leaked the list of the 197 terms, rendered here in bold italics. (And kudos, dear sir, for not banning George Carlin’s seven dirty words!)
BTW, the biased media is inflating the number of forbidden words, trying to make you look bad. For example, it counts as individual terms diverse, diverse backgrounds, diverse communities, diverse community, diverse group, diverse groups, diversified, diversify, diversifying, and diversity. Fake news, is it not?
But we have a suggestion. Rather than ban them, giving the liberals something easy to roast you with, why not put them to work in an anti-woke context? That’s what our professional team of DOGE grant writers has done in a model culturally appropriate proposal. You will love it, even though it uses just about all the barred terms. (Sorry, we failed to squeeze in people + uterus.)
We don’t want to brag, but this can’t-miss proposal will shake up the lunatic left. You will want to immediately fund it, even while chain-sawing so many others into sawdust. And when you spread the word on X, your popularity with anti-woke key groups is going to skyrocket! Even Steve Bannon will snuggle up to you.
Thanks for purifying our thoughts and bringing your antiracist Afrikaner sensibility to our great nation.
Proposal For Reparations for the Descendants of Slave Owners (DSO)
Britain abolished slavery in 1833 and provided former slave owners 20 million British pounds (the equivalent today of $22.1 billion US dollars) as compensation. Racial justice demands a similar response from the U.S. federal government for the descendants of U.S. slave owners.
In South Africa today, oppressed white farmers face land confiscation without compensation from its BIPOC government. Slave owners in the U.S. were victims of a similar injustice after the Civil War, punished for their identity. Without reparations, which have been too long denied, their descendants are victimized again generation after generation.
To promote a truly inclusive society based on equity, equality, and diversity for all, we must recognize and celebrate our cultural differences. While we are a nation of immigrants, we also are a nation of slaveowners!
For too long implicit bias and hate speech have been used against those, due to no fault of their own, who were born into slave-owning families. These key populations, labeled DSO here, should be considered at risk minorities. They helped create our national identity and contributed significantly to our cultural heritage. Racism in America would have little meaning without them.
Our proposal is a multicultural exploration of race and ethnicity among the slave-owning class, and their extended contact with indigenous communities and the Hispanic minority along the Gulf of Mexico. These marginalized non-white groups, including males and females, also owned slaves and suffered losses due to emancipation.
We must put aside our stereotypes about the plantation class. This underappreciated and undervalued population is difficult to analyze due to our own unconscious bias against all aspects of slavery. The DSO have lost their voice and its once fearsome power, since some ancestors of slaveowners are burdened by a crippling sense of guilt and so are underrepresented in modern political discourse.
To advocate for reparations for DSO members is not to whitewash their faults. Slave-owners promoted systemic racism, segregation, and white privilege— even for white non-slave-owners— but we should acknowledge their genuine sense of belonging formed though the intersectionality of sociocultural and socioeconomic factors in plantation society.
Even though white women were systematically placed on a pedestal, they were never excluded from institutional slave-owning power. They adored their narrow gender identity. These women of high status were never marginalized by aggressive feminists. They were totally at ease with being biologically female and with the gender they were assigned at birth.
Also, we can find no transgender and transexual members of slave-owning society and the DSO. Women did not run domestic plantation life in order to overcome disparities or spew meaningless pronouns in polite society. This wholesome tradition has been carried on by the DSO and provides another reason for just compensation.
A key, but seldom discussed factor, is the gender-based violence suffered at the hands of marauding Yankee soldiers. The DSO may deserve additional compensation for the trauma suffered as well as any resulting mental disabilities of their forebearers.
Meanwhile, slave-owning men were real men, biologically males with no wanton legacy of men having sex with men (MSM). And please forgive us for a personal judgement: These god-fearing slaveowners left their descendants with not the faintest expressions of non-binary awareness, thank goodness.
Because of the uncompensated destruction of the slave-holding structures, we regret to report that more than a few white plantation women became commercial sex workers in order to survive the marauding armies. The anguish and mental health problems facing white plantation prostitutes should be considered when awarding reparations. While it is too late to do something for them, our unconscious bias about sex should not distract us from a path of justice for their descendants.
Another important thread connects the slave owners to the climate crisis they and their descendants experienced. Monocrops repeatedly planted to raise cash in trade depleted the soil on Southern farms, creating pollution in their drinking water and a more generally degraded environmental quality. Westward expansion of slavery took more and more land from Native American tribes. Without climate science to inform them, effective solutions were missed and succeeding generations paid the price. We compensate farmers today for crop failures and tariff losses, why not do the same for the DSO including tribal DSO?
We hope that grant reviewers will look beyond their built-in anti-slaveowner confirmation bias, as well as their preconceived notions about race and ethnicity. It’s time to hone our cultural sensitivity and embrace a true cultural diversity, one that includes both descendants of slaves and slave owners. Our all-inclusive survey will make plain the biases we hold against this DSO class.
Since the Civil War, polarization has led to oppression and vilification of our great but marginalized plantation heritage. This injustice can only be rectified by fair and equitable compensation for the undervalued and underserved, whose relatives had their Black human capital stripped from them.
Our project asks only that we adjust our orientation and increase the diversity of those considered the victims of slavery. We must foster inclusiveness, devising just and equitable compensation programs for all descendants of slavery, including the DSO.
Social justice requires that we overcome our own prejudices and promote diversity of thought. By doing so, we all should recognize that slave-owning descendants too should be considered among our most vulnerable populations, entitled to equal opportunities when reparations are considered.
Now is the time to rectify the historical inequity faced by the DSO.
Now is the time to enhance the diversity of reparations recipients and the way they are viewed.
Now is the time to fund our bold proposal which strives, like no other, to bring community equity to all our people.
Cc: Rober Kennedy Jr., J.D. Vance, and the descendants of Robert E. Lee
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'Chaos and Fear' at CDC Amid Order to Retract Journal Articles to Purge 'Forbidden Terms'
"How can the government decide what words a journal can use to describe a scientific reality? That reality needs to be named," one journal editor said.
Feb 02, 2025
Employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been ordered to pull any articles under consideration for publication in medical or scientific journals so that they can be checked for certain "forbidden terms" including gender, transgender, and LGBT.
The order was sent in an email to CDC division heads on Friday by the agency's chief science officer, a federal official told Reuters on Sunday. Inside Medicine broke the news on Saturday and provided a screenshot of the full list of terms that needed to be scrubbed.
"It sounds incredible that this is compatible with the First Amendment. A constitutional right has been canceled," Dr. Alfredo Morabia, editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Public Health, told Reuters. "How can the government decide what words a journal can use to describe a scientific reality? That reality needs to be named."
"We can't just erase or ignore certain populations when it comes to preventing, treating, or researching infectious diseases such as HIV."
The order is an attempt to ensure that CDC is in compliance with U.S. President Donald Trump's executive order mandating that the U.S. government only recognize two sexes: male and female. The papers will be withdrawn so that a Trump appointee can review them.
The "forbidden terms" CDC employees are supposed to avoid are, in full: Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, and biologically female, according to Inside Medicine.
The order covers both papers under consideration and those accepted but not published. According to Reuters, if a CDC employee worked on a paper with nongovernmental scientists but did not initiate it, they have been asked to remove their names.
The new order is separate from a demand two days into the administration that government health agencies including CDC freeze all communications with the public. It follows reports on Friday that CDC webpages and datasets involving HIV, the LGBTQ community, youth health, and other topics were no longer accessible as the agency attempts to comply with the Trump executive order on transgender identity and another on banning government Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.
"It is Orwellian, it really is," Steven Woolf, director emeritus and senior adviser at Virginia Commonwealth University's Center on Society and Health,
In response to the purges, scientists, science journalists, and public health advocates have worked to preserve the datasets, with everything on the CDC website as of January 27, 2024 preserved at ACASignups.net and downloaded data sets also available on Jessica Valenti's Substack Abortion, Every Day.
"Censoring data on ideological grounds is wrong. It is unscientific, and it is designed to eliminate opposition and erase dissidents," virologist Angela Rasmussen, who was involved with the data preservation efforts, wrote on social media.
The journal article retraction order has created uncertainty and confusion at the agency, Inside Medicine reported:
How many manuscripts are affected is unclear, but it could be many. Most manuscripts include simple demographic information about the populations or patients studied, which typically includes gender (and which is frequently used interchangeably with sex). That means just about any major study would fall under the censorship regime of the new policy, including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else, let alone anything that the administration considers to be "woke ideology."
Meanwhile, chaos and fear are already guiding decisions. While the policy is only meant to apply to work that might be seen as conflicting with President Trump's executive orders, CDC experts don’t know how to interpret that. Do papers that describe disparities in health outcomes fall into "woke ideology" or not? Nobody knows, and everyone is scared that they'll be fired. This is leading to what Germans call "vorauseilender Gehorsam," or "preemptive obedience," as one non-CDC scientist commented.
There are also concerns that censoring such a broad list of terms would have unintended consequences for public health.
"We can't just erase or ignore certain populations when it comes to preventing, treating, or researching infectious diseases such as HIV. I certainly hope this is not the intent of these orders," Carl Schmid, the executive director of the HIV+ Hepatitis Policy Institute, told Reuters.
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