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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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The Palestine Exception, Right-Wing Elite Capture, and New Student Visa Rules
Trump’s aim is a campaign of terror and intimidation against universities and colleges designed to suppress free speech and critical thinking.
May 30, 2025
People in the United States of America continue to allow the normalization of very dangerous measures solidifying authoritarian government, and the administration of President Donald Trump continues to escalate each measure. The latest measure arrived on May 27 when Secretary of State Marco Rubio ended all embassy reviews of applications for student and exchange visas from foreign nationals, stating that a new policy including social media vetting will be announced soon. Rubio also suspended scheduling any new interviews for three types of visas that enable foreign nationals to participate in U.S. institutions: F (for students at academic institutions), M (for students in vocational or non-academic schools), and J (for teaching and research exchange visitors). The new policy has not been revealed yet.
Here is yet another case that should break the people of the U.S.—if not the feckless supposed opposition party, the Democrats—from their political paralysis. The Trump administration inherited a largely informal apparatus of campus repression relying on the defamation, arrest, and suspension of students and faculty members who opposed the U.S. role in supporting what the Israeli government now openly admits is a campaign of deliberate starvation and full land dispossession of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. Trump’s administration seized upon the zeitgeist already brewed by university leaders and fueled by a coalition of Zionist and far-right organizations, and seized it with an aim far more expansive than simply punishing pro-Palestinian activism and speech.
Trump is not attacking Harvard, but extorting the institution in an attempt to put its allowable pedagogies and discourses beneath his state.
Trump’s aim is a campaign of terror and intimidation against universities and colleges designed to suppress free speech and critical thinking. The “Palestine exception” has proven to be a useful proxy as its enforcers are not simply the usual MAGA suspects, but include many liberal Democrats and cultural custodians who spent the last few years warning of Trump’s dangers while gladly serving as the handmaids of a repression whose contours they foolishly believed they could limit to one supposedly justified cause. The collaboration with only nominal opponents of antisemitism was a clever move by the MAGA right, as it bound them to silence in a pivotal early phase.
Now the later phase of the Trumpian war on free speech and free thought in higher education is unleashed, and the sorts of powers that Rubio will soon wield over student and researcher visas will allow for the state to pick and choose who enters the halls of academe—and who will be punished for eventually transgressing servitude to the ruling ideology.
Some people are mistakenly calling Trump’s higher education measures an “attack on universities.” Trump’s agenda is far from an attack—it is a right-wing elite capture, in which the current liberal managerial keepers of institutions either are replaced with MAGA counterparts or the current keepers break down and comply (and some already have). Jokes abound about the possible mismatch of some poorly-educated MAGA bootlicker running Harvard or Yale, but Trump’s administration and its congressional lackeys are mostly Ivy Leaguers themselves. U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the most strident congressional Inquisitor of college presidents, is a Yale graduate like Vice President JD Vance. Trump went to Penn. Steve Bannon went to Harvard, like Pete Hegseth.
Trump is not attacking Harvard, but extorting the institution in an attempt to put its allowable pedagogies and discourses beneath his state. He has tried the same at Columbia University, and his administration states that the University of California system is next. The Task Force on Antisemitism led by gadfly former television commentator Leo Terrell functions as a spear tip of moralistic outrage masking the shakedown that Trump’s gangster presidency is actually waging. Trump and his collaborators don’t want to shut down Harvard, Columbia, or any institution of higher education whose trustees will turn over the keys to the MAGA regime. As the DOGE “cuts” demonstrate, the Trump administration understands how to effect ideological capture using traditional but empty Republican rhetoric about balancing budgets and preventing “waste.” The goal is to claim the spoils of the state, and use all state organs to assault private institutions that harbor resistance to the state.
Of course, this ideological capture is far from abstract as it brutally impacts the lives of foreign students lawfully studying and exerting their First Amendment rights (which apply to everyone on our soil, contrary to the Trump doctrine’s insistence otherwise) in the United States. Before both the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs in May, Rubio reiterated his servile liturgy on the pro-Palestinian students targeted by the Trump administration, sometimes at the behest of Zionist organizations like Betar.
“I will continue to revoke student visas,” Rubio stated, while also repeating an argument ad hominem that the targeted students occupied and damaged campus buildings and threatened other students. When asked about the case of the now-released Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Özturk, who was arrested and disappeared to Louisiana for the mere act of co-signing a student newspaper editorial, Rubio reset to the same defamatory lines about breaking campus rules and a visa not being a right but a privilege.
Georgetown University postdoctoral researcher Badar Khan Suri, baselessly accused by the Department of Homeland Security of spreading Hamas propaganda, was chained at the ankles and wrists during his detention at Prairieland Detention Center in Texas, where he was housed from his March arrest until a federal judge ordered his release in May. Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who actually holds a green card and not a visa, remains incarcerated in Louisiana and missed the birth of his child and his graduation ceremony.
While the ultimate goal of the Trump administration is a right-wing elite capture of higher education, especially its most prestigious institutions, the weaponization of the Palestine exception will not be dissipating any time soon. In the wake of federal judges freeing some of the students disappeared for their speech, Trump ally U.S. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) declared that “Palestinianism”—by which he means all recognition of Palestinian people as human beings—is terrorism that should not be allowed in U.S. Fine also endorsed dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza to murder its entire remaining population. After the terrible murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim outside of the Capitol Jewish Museum by a purported pro-Palestine activist, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that even stating “Free Palestine” is equivalent to saying “Heil Hitler.” Hate speech that keeps possible opponents of authoritarianism divided—and causes real harm—tragically is one of the main currencies of Trump’s MAGA movement.
No one should expect any consistency even on the question of antisemitism, because Trump is only committed to hegemonic power for his state and its collaborators. There is no moral principles held categorically, which is why moralistic opposition politics have largely done nothing to stop Trump’s hold on power tightening. While Rubio is railing against pro-Palestine students, Trump’s white nationalist supporters were cheering the admission into the U.S. of 49 Afrikaaner farmers from South Africa, including one who had called Jewish people “dangerous” and “untrustworthy.” Again, Trump wants immigration just like he wants Harvard—just in forms that extend his ideological capture and venerate his broadly racist, patriarchal nationalism.
As international students comprise 5.9% of U.S. university admissions, they represent a mighty financial cudgel. In 2023-4, 25% of international students in the U.S. were studying math or computer science and 20% were studying engineering, they may be less likely to engage in political activism than their domestic counterparts and even before Trump more likely to keep a low profile to their host government (not to mention governments back home). Trump’s coalition includes a lot of people who are genuine extremist Zionists, so expect him to offer up more international students and for the State Department’s new policies to include social media scans of pro-Palestine content. Yet also expect Trump to be ready to make deals with any and all institutions of higher education who will cave to his demands for controlling allowable teaching and expression—and any nations who pledge that their students will arrive obedient. And, tragically, expect a lot of U.S. universities and colleges to fall in line.
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AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented
If we allow the far-right to continue merging political power with AI without guardrails, we will see the rise of a system where freedom is algorithmically rationed.
May 13, 2025
Pope Leo XIV just labeled Artificial Intelligence one of the main threats facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to “human dignity, justice, and labor.” He’s right, but it’s even worse than that: It represents, unless it’s rigorously regulated, a threat to democracy itself.
In every generation, the enemies of democracy change costumes, but their playbook remains eerily familiar. They lie, divide, intimidate, and exploit every available tool to consolidate power. In the 1930s it was radio, in the 2010s it was social media, and now, in 2025, the newest and most dangerous weapon in the authoritarian arsenal is artificial intelligence.
Make no mistake: AI is not just another technology. It is power, scaled. And in the hands of the far right, it becomes the most effective tool for dismantling democracy ever invented.
We’re not just fighting bad actors anymore: We’re fighting machines trained to think like them.
Authoritarians—whether MAGA-aligned in the United States or part of the global movement that includes Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and others—are not blind to the potential of AI. They understand it instinctively: its ability to simulate, to deceive, to surveil, and to dominate. While progressives and democratic institutions have scrambled to comprehend its implications, the authoritarians have already started weaponizing it with devastating efficiency.
Let’s look at the mechanisms.
AI can now generate millions of personalized political messages in seconds, each calibrated to manipulate a voter’s specific fears or biases. It can create entire fake news outlets, populate them with AI-generated journalists, and flood your social feed with content that looks real, sounds real, and feels familiar, all without a single human behind it. Imagine the power of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine, but with superintelligence behind the wheel and zero friction. That’s where we’re heading.
And that’s just the beginning.
Authoritarian regimes can—and already are—using AI to surveil and intimidate their citizens. What China has perfected with facial recognition and loyalty scoring, MAGA-aligned figures in the U.S. are watching closely, eager to adopt and adapt. Right-wing sheriffs and local governments could soon use AI to track protestors, compile digital dossiers, and “predict” criminal behavior in communities deemed politically undesirable.
If the government knows not just where you are, but what you’re thinking, organizing, or reading—and it can fabricate “evidence” to match—freedom of thought becomes a quaint memory.
This isn’t theoretical. In 2024, we saw AI-generated robocalls impersonating former President Joe Biden telling voters to stay home (and millions did). In the next cycle, we may see entire election campaigns waged by AI bots masquerading as voters, influencers, and even public officials.
U.S. President Donald Trump, during the 2024 election campaign, reposted a fake AI image of Taylor Swift endorsing him, over her objection; many believed she’d become a Trump supporter. As the Carnegie Endowment for Peace noted:
Meanwhile, deepfake audio clips of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Slovakia’s opposition head, Michal Šimečka, ignited social media controversies when they spread rapidly before fact-checkers exposed them as fabrications. The destructive power of deepfakes also hit home in Türkiye when a presidential candidate withdrew from the May 2023 election after explicit AI-generated videos went viral. In Argentina’s October 2023 presidential election, both leading candidates deployed deepfakes by creating campaign posters and materials that mocked their opponents—tactics that escalated into full-blown AI memetic warfare to sway voters.
The goal often isn’t just to win; it’s to delegitimize the democratic process itself. Because once trust is broken—once people believe that “both sides lie” or that “you can’t believe anything anymore”—then strongmen step into the void with promises of order, purity, and salvation.
And when they do, AI will be there to enforce it.
Imagine a future where police departments outsource their decision-making to “neutral” algorithms, algorithms coded with the biases of their creators like Elon Musk is doing by training Grok on Xitter. Where AI-driven systems deny permits, benefits, or even due process based on behavioral profiles. Where loyalty to the regime is rewarded with access, and dissent is flagged by invisible systems you can’t appeal.
That’s not democracy. That’s techno-feudalism, wrapped in a red-white-and-blue flag.
It’s already happening in Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, the Philippines, and Thailand, according to the Carnegie Endowment. They add:
In the E.U.’s Eastern neighborhood, countries like Georgia, Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine face a deluge of hybrid threats and AI-generated disinformation campaigns aimed at destabilizing societies, disrupting electoral processes, and derailing people’s democratic aspirations.
If we allow the far-right to continue merging political power with AI without guardrails, we will see the rise of a system where freedom is algorithmically rationed.
Elections will still happen, but outcomes will be massaged. Dissent will still exist, but only in controlled pockets, easy to monitor and suppress. History books will be written, edited, and distributed by code optimized for obedience. The “news” will be whatever the regime’s AI decides you should see.
This is not science fiction. It is the logical endpoint of unregulated, authoritarian-aligned artificial intelligence.
So what do we do?
We must treat AI regulation as a democratic survival issue. That means:
- Banning the use of deepfakes in political ads.
- Enforcing transparency on algorithmic decision-making.
- Creating unbiased public, open-source alternatives to corporate-controlled models.
- Creating disinformation infrastructure as we would biological or nuclear weapons that are not just dangerous, but potentially civilization-ending.
- Demanding that social media outlets publish their algorithms so we can see how we’re being manipulated.
And we must do it now.
Because history teaches us that once authoritarianism takes root, it rarely gives up power voluntarily. The longer we wait, the more embedded, autonomous, and intelligent these systems become. We’re not just fighting bad actors anymore: We’re fighting machines trained to think like them.
The battle for democracy in the age of AI will not be won with slogans or optimism alone. It will take law, oversight, courage—and above all, vigilance. As always, democracy is not a spectator sport. If we want to preserve the sacred right of self-governance, we must recognize the existential threat in front of us and act with urgency.
This time, the fight isn’t just against the usual suspects.
This time, the algorithm is watching.
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