Moyers Has His Say

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



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



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.



If
reporting on what’s happening to ordinary people thrown overboard by
circumstances beyond their control and betrayed by Washington officials
is liberalism, I stand convicted.



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