The Moyers Legacy

Even in an age of old-media uncertainty, much is still made of the
transfer of network anchor and host positions. Too often the discussion
is purely about personality, but there's more to it than a celebrity
shuffle: the character and content of programs with rich histories and
the potential for crucial contributions to civic discourse are at stake.
So oceans of ink are spilled when CBS shifts the news anchor chair from
Dan Rather to Bob Schieffer to Katie Couric; or when Tim Russert's
Meet the Press post goes to David Gregory. Unfortunately, scant
attention has been paid to the coming shift of what over the past decade
has become the most significant seat in broadcast journalism--the Friday
night position occsupied by Bill Moyers.

Moyers has been the most radical presence on broadcast and cable
television since 2002, when the former White House press secretary,
newspaper publisher, CBS and NBC commentator, bestselling author and
award-winning documentarian settled into the work of producing weekly
reviews not of the transitory arguments of the moment but of the great
debates on the fate of the Republic. What has made Moyers, who will
retire in April, such a radical presence is not his politics but his
journalism.

As the host of NOW With Bill Moyers, Moyers on America
and, since 2007, Bill Moyers Journal, he has provided an antidote
to the blather served up by most news and public affairs programs. Never
satisfied to practice stenography to power, as so many news programs do,
or to moderate recitations of talking points by political hacks, Moyers
refuses to treat Americans as imbeciles who need to be ideologically
coddled.

Moyers has always chosen his guests with a purpose: to put new ideas,
new analyses, new approaches on the table when most outlets invite
talking-head insiders to narrow the range of options. So he has earned
the ire of the political and corporate elites who benefit most from a
constrained debate as he has cultivated an oasis for outliers who offer
unbought and unbossed takes on wars of whim, executive excess, economic
wrongdoing and, above all, the corruption of politics.

This has made Moyers, whose pronouncements in recent years have
celebrated the populist and progressive reformers of a century ago, a
tribune for some of the most insightful progressive thinkers of our
time, including Barbara Ehrenreich, Lawrence Lessig, Glenn Greenwald,
Michael Pollan, Nikki Giovanni, Roberto Lovato and George Soros.

But Moyers was never satisfied to push the ideological boundary to the
left; he also pushed to the right. During the Bush/Cheney years, he
hosted not only liberal and progressive critics of the administration
(including editors and writers from this magazine) but also
conservatives like Richard Viguerie, Cal Thomas and Ron Paul, the Texas
Republican the host famously introduced, with a reference to Paul's
warnings about the folly of invading Iraq, as "a man who was right when
no one listened."

Indeed, while other media outlets portrayed the mid-2000s as a time of
simplistic partisan positioning, Moyers viewers were among the first to
learn that true conservatives were angry with the GOP administration's
excessive spending and disregard for the Constitution. And then, after
Barack Obama took office, Moyers began to highlight criticisms from the
left and right of the Democratic president's Wall Street-friendly
economic policies and unfulfilled promises on torture and transparency.

This delight in dissent from conventional wisdom--from wherever it may
come on the political spectrum--made Moyers a worthy successor to the
late William F. Buckley, whose 1966-99 program, Firing Line, was
similarly adventurous when it came to challenging compromised
decision-makers and compromised journalism. A man of the mainstream
right, Buckley invited onto his show libertarians and socialists,
Margaret Thatcher and Jesse Jackson, Ronald Reagan and Noam Chomsky,
Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith. Just as Firing Line
mattered, not merely because of the topics but because of the liveliness
and intelligence of the discussion, so watching Moyers has mattered.

The question is whether what comes next will matter. PBS plans to
replace BillMoyers Journal with a public affairs program
featuring a new format. Whoever fills the slot will no doubt do things
differently, which is to be expected. But it's crucial that a forum be
maintained for those with dissenting views--on the left and the
right--and for those who are ready to toss aside talking points and
wrestle honestly with the great issues of the day. Moyers has created a
necessary forum, as did Buckley before him. To lose it would be
disastrous, not just for PBS and broadcast television but for our
Republic, which can ill afford the hollow hectoring and pointless
positioning that passes for debate on TV programs that in entire seasons
don't say as much as Bill Moyers does in a single show.