Profile of Bill Moyers on Famous Like Me

Bill D. Moyers (born June 5, 1934) is an American journalist and public commentator.

He was born in Hugo, Oklahoma and was raised in Texas. Moyers began his journalism career at age 16 as a cub reporter at the Marshall News Messenger in Marshall, Texas. He and his wife, Judith Davidson Moyers, have three grown children.

During the Kennedy Administration, Moyers was appointed as Deputy Director of the Peace Corps (1961–63). When Lyndon Baines Johnson took office after the Kennedy assassination, Moyers became special Assistant to President Johnson and also served as White House Press Secretary from 1965 to 1967.

Best known for his work as a journalist, Moyers served as publisher for the Long Island, New York daily Newsday from 1967–1970. In 1986, Moyers and his wife Judith Davidson formed Public Affairs Television. One of their first productions was the popular PBS series Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth (1988). Moyers has also made PBS specials on literature, religion, and mythology.

Moyers hosted the TV newsjournal, NOW with Bill Moyers, on PBS for three years. He retired from the program on December 17, 2004. In July 2005 he returned to PBS to host Wide Angle.

Politics

Moyers is a major donor to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a media watch group which has conducted studies showing the media tends to feature more conservatives than liberals.

In a commentary after the 2002 election, Moyers said the Republican agenda includes "forc[ing] pregnant women to give up control over their own lives[,] using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich[,] giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment and control the regulatory agencies meant to hold them accountable[,] secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine[,] judges with a political agenda appointed for life[, and] God in government." In a 2003 interview with buzzflash.com, Moyers said "The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they've won."

In 2005, Moyers came under attack from Kenneth Tomlinson, the George W. Bush-appointed chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Tomlinson paid an outside consultant $14,000 to watch NOW with Bill Moyers and analyze the politics of the guest. Many on the right claimed that Moyers was an extreme leftist posing as a journalist. The CPB funded two explicitly right-wing shows (with Tucker Carlson and the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, respectively) for "balance".

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