#bill-moyers — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #bill-moyers, aggregated by home.social.
-
Happy birthday to #ToniMorrison, acclaimed novelist and the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 1990, Morrison sat down with #BillMoyers on “A World of Ideas” to discuss literature, life, and love.
Watch the full interview in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-d3ceb8f9079
-
Documentary on Journalist Bill Moyers in the Works From Kathleen Hughes and Tom Casciato
#Variety #News #BillMoyers #DocumentariestoWatch #PBShttps://variety.com/2025/film/news/bill-moyers-documentary-1236563573/
-
"that politics failed and we wound up in the Civil War, from which we still haven’t recovered.… Being a Southerner informed me about what happens when a society closes the wagons around itself, when it doesn’t tolerate good journalism or prophecy in the pulpit or truth-telling in the classroom."
-
Alterman quotes an interview Moyers did with Salon in 2003:
"I think my life, and certainly my career in journalism, have been informed by two things. One was being a Southerner. Whenever you learned about Southern life, you realize that when we drove the truth-tellers out of the pulpits, out of the editorial rooms and out of the classrooms—people who were telling the truth about slavery—"
-
Eric Alterman offers a touching reminiscence of his friend journalist Bill Moyers, noting:
"This ordained Baptist minister from a little town called Marshall, Texas, somehow became, for most practical purposes, my rabbi."
Alterman asks where Moyers got the fortitude to stick to his difficult and solitary path when he was very much a voice crying in the wilderness, especially in his native South.
#BillMoyers #courage #TruthTelling #journalism
/1https://newrepublic.com/article/197400/bill-moyers-dead-obituary-three-careers-excelled
-
Bill Moyers, the legendary PBS journalist and White House press secretary to Lyndon B. Johnson, died last week at age 91. His obituaries talked about his incredible life — born to a dirt farmer in Oklahoma, ordained a Baptist minister, present on Air Force One after the Kennedy assassination. But Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein, who knew Moyers via his work with the Center for Investigative Reporting, says there's another story to tell. "Moyers knew Trump was not an aberration, but the logical extension of a problem that went back decades," she writes. "Corruption, he wrote me, is 'a condition beyond individual scandals — more a totality of governance, a philosophy that says democracy exists for us to take what we can while we can—to hell with the law, rules, norms and the country. It’s the crime family manifesto of the mafia, affixed to the civic life and public affairs of the nation.'"
How best to honor his integrity, intelligence and commitment to truth and good journalism? "The best — and only — way to pay tribute to him is to go out and do the work," Bauerlein concludes.
#BillMoyers #InMemoriam #Journalism #News #Media #MediaIndustry #RIP
-
#BillMoyers #Journalism #USpol
Billy Don Moyers (June 5, 1934 – June 26, 2025) was an American journalist and political commentator
i only knew of bill moyers from his interviews with joseph campbell (a tv series and book called “the power of myth”).
thus morning i received an interesting newsletter from mother jones about bill’s legacy, and wanted to share some quotes
_——————-
Moyers was acutely aware, sooner than most, that big money was eating away at American democracy. “Ninety-six percent of the people believe it’s important that we reduce the influence of money [in politics],” he said in a 2014 interview. “Yet 91 percent think it’s not likely that its influence will be lessened. Think about that: People know what’s right to do yet don’t think it can or will be done. When the public loses faith in democracy’s ability to solve the problems it has created for itself, the game’s almost over. And I think we are this close to losing democracy to the mercenary class.” He went on to say that “there are people fighting back [and] if it weren’t for them, I would despair. It’s the people who are doing the nonviolent organizing at the grassroots that make me think there’s still hope.”
“If the watchdog doesn’t bark… how do you know there’s a burglar in the basement? And the press is supposed to be a watchdog.”When I was growing up, I never heard anyone pray, “Give me this day my daily bread.” It was always, “Give us this day our daily bread.” That stuck. We’re all in this together. I take “We, the People” seriously because I don’t know how we build a civilization without reciprocity...
news is what’s hidden, everything else is publicity…
Q: We’ve always had an upper class in America. What’s different now? Moyers: The rich today are richer, there are more of them, they have round-the-clock propaganda factories…
One of our two major parties is dominated by extremists dedicated to destroying the social contract and the other party has been so enfeebled by two decades of collaboration with the donor class it can offer only feeble resistance to the forces that are devastating everyday people. Our economy is a plantation run for the aristocrats — the CEOs, hedge funds, private equity firms — while the field hands are left with the scraps…
They have raised ignorance to ideology and stupefied an entire political party…
Donald Trump did not come out of nowhere,” Moyers closed. “When he rode into town, it was ripe for plucking.”…
“…a conviction once expressed by Robert La Follette: “Democracy is a life, and requires daily struggle.” If it weren’t for them, I would despair. There’s a scene in Conrad’s The Secret Agent when the anarchist grows despondent over whether even the detonation of a bomb might arouse Londoners: “What if nothing could move them?”
———
a link to the 2014 interview
https://billmoyers.com/2014/05/08/an-interview-with-bill-moyers/
-
#ClimateChange #Media #BillMoyers
"When Mark Hertsgaard and Katrina vanden Heuvel of *The Nation* and Kyle Pope of the *Columbia Journalism Review* approached Moyers in early 2019 wanting to break the 'climate silence' that had long pervaded the news media, Moyers immediately grasped the urgency of the mission and threw himself into bringing it to life. His keynote speech at a conference at the Columbia School of Journalism that April that would give birth to CCNow managed to be both rousing and funny—not an easy thing when discussing a crisis that 'journalists must figure out how to cover as if life on earth depends on it, which it does,' Moyers said.
Urging his fellow journalists to push back against the commercial considerations that can cloud newsroom leaders’ judgment, Moyers invoked Murrow’s battles in 1939 to get his bosses in New York to let him cover Hitler’s impending invasion of Poland rather than the dance contests in London and Paris the bosses wanted. Moyers then challenged journalists today to step up to our historical moment—to break our profession’s silence about the climate crisis and its abundant solutions. 'Our responsibility as journalists,' he said, 'is to tell the story so people get it.'
Moyers also was instrumental in raising the first $1 million in philanthropic support that launched Covering Climate Now. By that September, CCNow had organized 323 news outlets across the United States and around the world to do one week of dedicated climate reporting. By coincidence, a Swedish teenager named Greta Thunberg inspired an estimated 6 million people to take to the streets around the world that same week demanding climate action. The combination of high-profile news coverage and massive civil-society mobilization triggered a decisive shift. Government leaders could no longer ignore the crisis without political risk. Media leaders began to see that climate change mattered to the public and deserved more news coverage."
https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/bill-moyers-climate-change-media/
-
"And if we don’t address this, if we don’t get a handle on what we were talking about, money in politics, and find a way to thwart it, tame it, we’re in trouble. Democracy should be a brake on unbridled greed and power. Because capitalism – capital, like a fire, can turn from a servant, a good servant, into an evil master. And democracy is the brake on my passions and my appetites, and your greed and your wealth."
-
"Everything public has been under assault since the late 1970s, the early years of the Reagan administration because there is a philosophy that’s been extant in America for a long time, that anything public is less desirable than private. ...
The power of money trumps the power of democracy today, and I’m very worried about it."
-
"I think this country is in a very precarious state at the moment. I think, as I say, the escalating, accumulating power of organized wealth is snuffing out everything public, whether it’s public broadcasting, public schools, public unions, public parks, public highways."
-
In remembering the irreplaceable and morally grounded journalist who died yesterday, Bill Moyers, Amy Goodman points to an interview she and Juan González did with him in 2011, which focused on his critique of corporate media as corrupt. He said,
"The consensual seduction of the mainstream media by and with the government is one of the most dangerous toxins at work in America today."
-
2010: Bill Moyers signs off his last broadcast with an editorial discussion on why plutocracy and democracy don't mix.
-
On Thursday, we lost #BillMoyers, whose work illuminated the world and the amazing people in it. Courtesy of @wgbh's American Archive of Public Broadcasting, this video from November of '73 features Moyers chatting with #MayaAngelou, as he did with so many other icons of his time on Thirteen WNET New York's "Bill Moyers Journal" series. The clip captures the thoughtfulness and warmth that he brought into his journalistic work. RIP BM! 🙏
-
Watching him was one of the really fun parts of j-school! RIP, sir.
#BillMoyers, the former White House press secretary turned acclaimed TV #journalist, dead at 91 https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5448105/bill-moyers-the-former-white-house-press-secretary-turned-acclaimed-tv-journalist-dead-at-91
-
Documentary Emmys Winners List: Nat Geo, Netflix Lead, MSNBC’s ‘The Sing Sing Chronicles’ Lands Top Prize and Bill Moyers Is Paid Tribute
#Variety #Awards #News #BillMoyers #NatGeo #NationalAcademyOfTelevisionArtsSciences #NewsDocumentaryEmmys #TheSingSingChronicles
