Moyers Has His Say

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Moyers Has His Say
Former Now host on media bias and his feud with former CPB Chairman Ken Tomlinson
By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 11/28/2005




Bill Moyers became the central figure in absentia in the controversy surrounding former Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson. It was Tomlinson who pointed to Moyers' Now newscast on PBS as a chief reason for his efforts to bring “balance” to public broadcasting by adding conservative shows. Moyers has since left Now and is currently president of the Schumann Center for Media & Democracy. He spoke with B&C's John Eggerton in the wake of a CPB Inspector General report concluding Tomlinson had violated the law by dealing directly with a programmer during the creation of a show to balance Moyers' program.

You are the exemplar of liberal PBS bias, according to Ken Tomlinson. Was your show liberally biased?

Right-wing partisans like Tomlinson have always attacked aggressive reporting as liberal.

We were biased, all right—in favor of uncovering the news that powerful people wanted to keep hidden: conflicts of interest at the Department of Interior, secret meetings between Vice President Cheney and the oil industry, backdoor shenanigans by lobbyists at the FCC, corruption in Congress, neglect of wounded veterans returning from Iraq, Pentagon cost overruns, the manipulation of intelligence leading to the invasion of Iraq.

We were way ahead of the news curve on these stories, and the administration turned its hit men loose on us.

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It just shows the incredible pressure journalism is under... This isn't right... PBS isn't owned my Murdoch ... they had to get even PBS

kept telling me to watch 'now'. i only caught the last 6 months of the show. bill moyers is my hero.

ellen fl