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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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Fired by MSNBC for Giving Voice to Iraq War Opposition, Phil Donahue (1935-2024) Was Courage Personified
The journalist and TV show host, who died Sunday at the age of 88, made his mark on our society. He fought for the underdog. He did it with style and grace and a wonderful sense of humor. He changed my life and the lives of so many others.
Aug 19, 2024
Phil Donahue passed away Sunday night, after a long illness. He was beloved by those who knew him and by many who didn’t.
He started as a local reporter in Ohio, was a trailblazer in bringing social issues to a national audience as a daytime broadcast TV host, and then he was pretty-much banished from TV by MSNBC because he—accurately, correctly, and morally—questioned the horrific U.S. invasion of Iraq.
In the 1970s, Phil took progressive issues and mainstreamed them to millions through his syndicated daytime show. He was a pioneer in syndication. He also pioneered on the issues; his most frequent guests on his daytime show were Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem, and Rev. Jesse Jackson. They appeared dozens of times as Phil boosted civil rights, women’s rights, and consumer rights. He regularly hosted Dr. Sidney Wolfe warning of the greedy pharmaceutical industry and unsafe drugs. Raised a Catholic, he also featured advocates for atheism.
Mainstream media obits will likely focus on his daytime TV episodes that included male strippers or other titillation, but Phil was serious about the issues—and did far more than most mainstream TV journalists to address the biggest issues.
I was a senior producer on Phil’s short-lived MSNBC primetime show in 2002 and 2003. It was frustrating for us to have to deal with the men Phil called “the suits”—NBC and MSNBC executives who were intimidated by the Bush administration and resisted any efforts by NBC/MSNBC to practice journalism and ask tough questions of Washington before our young people were sent to Iraq to kill or be killed. Ultimately, Phil was fired because—as the leaked internal memo said—Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war.”
But before we were terminated, we put guests on the screen who were not commonly on mainstream TV. We offered a full hour with Barbara Ehrenreich on Labor Day in 2002; a full hour with veteran journalist Studs Terkel; interviews with progressive members of Congress, including Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich; and segments with the "maverick" Texas Observer columnist Molly Ivins; and offered platforms to foreign policy experts like Phyllis Bennis and Laura Flanders as well as Palestinian advocates, including Hanan Ashrawi.
No one on American television cross-examined Israeli leaders like Phil did when he interviewed then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. They seemed stunned—never having faced such questioning from a U.S. journalist.
But “the suits” ruined our show when they took control and actually mandated a quota system favoring the right wing: If we had booked one guest who was antiwar, we needed to book two that were pro-war. If we had one guest on the left, we needed two on the right. When a producer suggested booking Michael Moore—known to oppose the pending Iraq war—she was told she’d need to book three rightwingers for political balance.
Three weeks before the Iraq war started, and after some of the biggest antiwar mobilizations the world had ever seen (which were barely covered on mainstream TV), the suits at NBC/MSNBC terminated our show.
- YouTubeyoutu.be
Phil was a giant. A huge celebrity who supported uncelebrated indy media outlets. He loved and supported the progressive media watch group FAIR (which I founded in the mid-1980s.)
Phil put Noam Chomsky on mainstream TV. He fought for Ralph Nader to be included in the 2000 presidential debates. He went on any TV show right after 9/11 that would have him to urge caution and to resist the calls for vengeful, endless warfare that would pointlessly kill large numbers of civilians in other countries. He opposed active wars and the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He supported war veterans and produced an important documentary on the topic: “Body of War,” on the life and death of Tomas Young.
Phil Donahue made his mark on our society. He fought for the underdog. He did it with style and grace and a wonderful sense of humor. He changed my life. And others’ lives.
He was inspired by the consciousness-raising groups he saw in the feminist movement and he sought to do consciousness-raising on a mass scale . . . using mainstream corporate TV. He did an amazing job of it.
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To Protect Democracy, Newsrooms Must Choose Op-Eds Responsibly
Editors owe a duty to the public to avoid hyperbolic opinion writing and “doom looping” that advance the interests of a privileged few.
Apr 09, 2024
On September 21, 1970, The New York Times ran its first “op-ed” page. Short for “opposite the editorial,” this new feature provided space for writers with no relationship to the newspaper’s editorial board to express their views. Before long, other newspapers followed suit. More than 50 years later, in order to compete with electronic media news, traditional newspapers have come to utilize opinion pages as a means to attract and keep readers.
Newspaper editors understood the power of opinion pieces as early as 1921 when editor Herbert Bayard Swope of the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York World said: “Nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting, so I devised a method of cleaning off the page opposite the editorial… and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts.”
The pioneering opinion pieces Swope published were written by newspaper staff; and, while he may have ignored some facts in the opinions he published, contemporary newspapers claim to aspire to journalistic integrity. In its op-ed guidelines, The Washington Post, for example, notes that all op-eds are fact-checked. Post guidelines explain that authors with “important titles,” like “senators, business leaders, heads of state,” are held “to a particularly high standard when considering whether to publish them in the Post.”
Too often, however, the aims of consolidated, corporatized media, owned and operated by megarich individuals, supersede Fourth Estate journalistic ethics and democratic duties.
As competition for the public’s attention stiffens in a social media and online communications-saturated environment, it’s perhaps not surprising that conflicts of interest arise in the op-ed pages. In 2011, more than 50 journalists and academics urged greater transparency about conflicts of interest among New York Times op-ed page contributors. In an October 6, 2011 letter to Arthur Brisbane, the Times’s public editor, they criticized the practice of “special interests surreptitiously funding ‘experts’ to push industry talking points in the nation’s major media outlets,” absent reporting of those writers’ vested interests.
In their letter to the Times, the signatories called out the unreported bias of Manhattan Institute senior fellow Robert Bryce. The Institute received millions of dollars in funding from the fossil fuel industry. Bryce’s promotion of fossil fuels rather than renewable energy, they wrote, flew in the face of his “masquerading as an unbiased expert.”
Corporate media consolidation has strategically limited the diversity of perspectives and the quality of journalism and unduly influenced audience opinion. With a handful of large corporations controlling a majority of media outlets, content homogenization and profit prioritization often replace journalistic integrity. For instance, the acquisition of hundreds of weekly and daily newspapers by conglomerates like Gannett has led to a reduction in independent voices, an increase in editorial uniformity, biased editorials and op-eds, and news deserts.
The Sinclair Broadcast Group’s ownership of approximately 200 television stations has been criticized for mandating the airing of politically slanted content, including editorials and op-eds, across its network. This centralized control over broadcasting allows for the dissemination of partisan perspectives, undermining public access to balanced, impartial news coverage. Instead, viewers are fed one-sided opinions aligned with corporate agendas, rather than presented with a diverse array of viewpoints.
Editorials and op-eds can and often do have a greater influence on public consciousness than news articles. In best-case scenarios, they express a broad spectrum of opinions, provide in-depth analysis, advocate for specific viewpoints, and connect with audiences through emotion and ethos. Publications adhering to journalistic ethics feature opinions written in the public’s best interest and offer a range of well-reasoned perspectives that enhance good-faith debate.
Because the importance of an issue is often equated with the type and amount of media coverage it gets, high-profile publishers bear a greater responsibility in curating opinion pieces. When premier newspapers publish op-eds that are irresponsibly written—whether echoing government propaganda and political biases or corporate interests, lacking fundamental facts or historical context, or wielding accusatory or derogatory language and sensationalized headlines—they “signal boost” for a particular viewpoint or agenda.
This type of writing is irresponsible and counter-democratic for several reasons. Many news consumers skim headlines, only reading articles with gripping titles and subtitles. Reckless opining is equally irresponsible because many Americans have difficulty distinguishing fact from opinion. News consumers do not always make the necessary distinction between what’s published in the “news” section versus “opinion,” according to Marist College journalism professor Kevin M. Lerner.
When established reporters and purported experts voice their views as authoritative, their opinions are often perceived as news rather than opinion. Readers give them greater weight because of their credentials. Editors thus bear a greater responsibility to ensure that their opinion pieces adhere to the highest standards of journalistic ethics. Failure to do so can amount to a form of reader manipulation. Such lapses not only compromise journalistic credibility but do a disservice to the public and the democratic process.
Daniel Macy, senior associate in the Office of the Public Editor at PBS, wrote a defense of news editorial decisions. Too often, he complained, news audiences incorrectly believe that the media shape the news agenda. Macy claimed that the news media merely mirror the agenda. If audiences believe there’s bias, he continued, that’s due to the ever-present prioritizing system that each news consumer keeps in their head. At the end of the day, he affirmed, the editor decides what makes the news. “That sounds a little bit agenda-setting, but it’s not.”
Macy’s denial notwithstanding, establishment media has an agenda-setting function, and editorial decisions factor into the formation of public opinion and individuals’ voting decisions. Although the media cannot necessarily tell audiences what to think, they certainly have the power to inform what and who audiences think about. Take the 2024 report by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) that investigated biased articles on economic topics, such as inflation, recession, and government debt and spending.
Searches of the 2023 New York Times and Washington Post archives revealed excessive prognosticating about a recession that never materialized and simultaneously correlated this to companies’ unjustifiably inflating prices. This sort of signal-boosting whipped up “fears of recession, a fantasy problem,” and directed attention away from the facts. In March 2024, writing on the strength of the U.S. economy, Louis Jacobson explored why so many Americans believe otherwise. The “self-reinforcing doom loops of media coverage and partisan biases” are at least partly, if not wholly, to blame, he wrote.
Opinion pieces that serve corporate or political agendas exemplify irresponsible editorializing. Editors owe a duty to the public to avoid hyperbolic opinion writing and “doom looping” that advance the interests of a privileged few. Too often, however, the aims of consolidated, corporatized media, owned and operated by megarich individuals, supersede Fourth Estate journalistic ethics and democratic duties. Manufacturing Consent (1988), the seminal work of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, shattered the illusion that the establishment media serve as a reliable check on power. Rather, media empires prop up the status quo and repeatedly display an unwillingness to challenge the power structures from which they profit.
Case in Point: Genocide Perpetrators Portrayed as Victims
A brief survey of opinion pieces related to 2023 headline news stories illustrates how unenforced editorial standards turned op-eds into forms of political propaganda. In the case of Israel’s genocidal acts against Palestinians in 2023 to 2024, editorials and op-eds in U.S. newspapers largely portrayed Israel as a victim, despite overwhelming evidence to support South Africa’s charge in the International Court of Justice that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
The Intercept published an analysis of media coverage during the first six weeks of the Israeli assault on Gaza, which helps to quantify the misuse of op-eds. The open-source inquiry into more than 1,000 articles revealed coverage that regularly favored the Israeli narrative. Consistent bias against Palestinians in The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times disproportionately described Israeli losses in emotional, humanizing language.
By contrast, Palestinian deaths were downplayed, as were the devastating impacts of the unprecedented bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip. The killing of journalists and children was similarly minimized. Harking back to Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky demonstrated the notion of “worthy and unworthy victims.” Victims of enemies of the United States and its client states are “worthy victims.” Correspondingly, in MintPress News (February 27, 2024) Alan Macleod wrote that deaths will only be covered extensively and compassionately in the establishment press if there’s political and economic capital to be gained.
Time and again, Western establishment news media showcase Israeli government and military officials and “authoritative voices” sympathetic to Israeli and U.S. policies to comment on the conflict.
The Intercept’s analysis detailed asymmetrical reporting on acts of antisemitism versus anti-Arab and anti-Muslim actions, and concluded that “[a]nalysis of both print media and cable news make[s] clear that, if any cohort of media consumers is getting a slanted picture, it’s those who get their news from established mass media in the U.S.”
In February 2024, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting released the results of its analysis of opinion pieces in The New York Times and Washington Post that mentioned Israel or Gaza, as published from October 7 to December 6, 2023. FAIR determined that, although both papers included a few strong pro-Palestinian voices, opinions weighed heavily toward Israeli interests.
That was largely due to reliance on regular columnists sympathetic to Israel. Guest opinion editorials in both papers primarily featured the same old government officials (domestic and foreign, past and present) and attendant think tank experts uncritical of Israel.
To give an example of “op-ed abuse” that advantages U.S. pro-war policies, a study by the Quincy Institute found that the majority of think tank experts featured in the establishment press supportive of Ukraine were paid by the U.S. Department of Defense. Conflating national and international security issues with a feigned need for expert opinion is nothing new—newspapers of record have a track record of employing op-eds to justify war.
Caitlin Johnstone has written that “a jarring number of media executives and influential journalists” belong to the Council on Foreign Relations. The Washington Post’s former managing editor, Richard Harwood, reportedly commented that media involvement in the council aids the United States in formulating and promoting its policies and positions.
Indeed, who does the reporting and opining is as instrumental to a story as its subject and how a story is told, as media analyst Sana Saeed of Al-Jazeera+ has analyzed. Time and again, Western establishment news media showcase Israeli government and military officials and “authoritative voices” sympathetic to Israeli and U.S. policies to comment on the conflict. To state the obvious, stenography—that is, uncritically quoting think tank executives and government bureaucrats—is not journalism. Nor does it carry weight in constructive opinion writing unless, perhaps, it’s contextualized to validate an argument.
Modern Media’s Duty to the Public
Traditional media have long served as sources for citizens to learn about their political leaders, policies, and government. Citizens should be able to trust their nation’s premier newspapers to maintain professed standards of professional ethics and to offer a plurality of newsworthy viewpoints.
Biased reporting is a breach of journalistic ethics. The preamble to the Society for Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, widely considered the gold standard of ethical journalism, states the belief “that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy,” and appeals to the integrity of every journalist, beginning with guidelines for seeking and reporting truth. A breach of ethics interferes with the public’s right to, and need for, accurate information.
Biased and propagandized publications may be thought of as a human rights issue too. According to Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, which includes the freedom to hold opinions without interference, and to seek and receive… information… through any media regardless of frontiers.” Thinking in those terms, reporting that’s biased, lacks transparency, or presents decontextualized information impedes Article 19’s contention that information seekers have the right to obtain facts and bias-free information.
Even in the digital age, America’s legacy media bear a consequential responsibility to the public. At a time when democracy is under strain, opinion pieces in our premier newspapers run the risk of abusing their status to steer public debate against the public welfare—especially when written by influential individuals with vested conflicts of interest.
Considering the blurred lines between legacy media and social media and between news and opinion, editorial decisions do more than undermine the role and reputation of journalism in a democracy; they jeopardize democracy itself.
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