NEW YORK – Former White House press secretary Bill Moyers, who became one of television’s most prestigious journalists, passed away Thursday at the age of 91, using visual media to light up the world of ideas.
Moyers passed away at a New York City hospital, according to longtime friend Tom Johnson, a former CEO of CNN and an assistant to Moyers during Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. Moiers’ son William said his father died at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York after a “long illness.”
Moyers’ career spans from a youthful Baptist pastor, to Johnson’s spokesman to newspaper publishers, senior news analysts at CBS Evening News and chief correspondents at CBS Reports, and deputy director of the Peace Corps.
However, it was because of public television that Moyers produced some of the most brain-provoking series on television. With hundreds of hours of PBS programmes, he proved at home in subjects ranging from government corruption to modern dance, drug addiction to media integration, and religion to environmental abuse.
In 1988, Moyers produced a “secret government” about the Iranian contrast scandal during the Reagan administration, and published a book under the same name at the same time. Around that time, he celebrated viewers with “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,” and is a series of six one-hour interviews with renowned religious scholars. The accompanying book has become a bestseller.
His televised chat with poet Robert Bree began the boys’ movement almost alone in the 1990s, and the 1993 series “Healing and Mind” had a major impact on the medical community and medical education.
In “talking heads,” a medium that appears to dislike the subject and the shots of interviewer stories, Moyer has become specialized in it. He once explained why: “The question is, are the talking heads thinking about the mind, people thinking? Are they interesting to watch?
(Silently) Tell the truth to power: Showing what someone called “soft and probing style” with a native Texas accent he had never lost, Moyer was a humanist who investigated the world from a calm, rational perspective, whatever the subject was.
From several quarters he was blown up as a liberal thanks to his links with Johnson and public television and his banned approach to investigative journalism. It was a label he wasn’t necessarily denied.
“When it comes to being open and interested in other people’s ideas, I’m an old-fashioned liberal,” he said in a 2004 radio interview. However, Moyer preferred to name himself an “civic journalist” who works independently outside of his founding.
Public television (and his self-funded production company) gave him the free reins, “There’s a democratic conversation open to every corner,” he said in a 2007 interview with the Associated Press.
“I think my commercial television buddies are talented and dedicated journalists,” he said at another time.
Over the years, Moyers have received honors including over 30 Emmys, 11 George Foster Peabody Awards, three George Polks, and two times the Alfred I. Dupont Columbia University Gold Baton Award for Career Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. In 1995 he was inducted into the TV Hall of Fame.
From sports to sports writing: Born June 5, 1934 in Hugo, Oklahoma, Billy Don Moyers was the son of a dirty farmer’s driver who quickly moved his family to Marshall, Texas. High school led him to journalism.
“I wanted to play soccer, but I was too small. But writing sports in the school newspaper revealed that players were always waiting at the newsstands to see what I had written,” he recalls.
He was 16 years old and worked for Marshall News Messenger. Determined Bill Moyers was a more appropriate signature for a sports writer, he dropped “Y” from his name.
He graduated from the University of Texas and received his Masters in Divinity from Baptist Theological Seminary in Southwest. He was appointed in two churches and preached part-time, but later decided that the call to the ministry was “the wrong number.”
His relationship with Johnson began when he was in college. He wrote the then Senator offer to work in the 1954 reelection campaign. Johnson was impressed and hired him for his summer job. He employed Johnson as a personal assistant in the early 1960s, where he worked for the Peace Corps for two years, eventually becoming Deputy Director.
On the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Moyer was helping out on his presidential trip. He returned to Washington with President Johnson in the newly sworn Washington 1.
Moyer’s duties as presidential spokesman were characterized by efforts to repair the worsening relationship between Johnson and the media. However, the Vietnam War was sacrificed, and in December 1966 Moyer resigned.
Regarding his departure from the White House, he later wrote:
He admitted he was “a keen to defend our policies,” and said he regretted criticizing journalists such as Pulitzer Prize-winning Peter Arnett.
In the long run on TV: In 1967, Moyers became the publisher of Newsday, based in Long Island, focusing on adding news analysis, research work and lively features. Within three years, Everyday Suburban had won two Pulitzers. He left the paper in 1970 after the ownership changed. That summer he traveled 13,000 miles across the country and wrote accounts for Odyssey’s bestselling. “Listen to America: Travelers will rediscover his country.”
His next venture was public television, which earned critical acclaim for the “Bill Moyers Journal.” In this series, interviews ranged from Swedish economist Gannar Mildal to poet Maya Angelou. He was a major correspondent for “CBS Reports” from 1976 to 1978, returning to PBS for three years, then became a senior news analyst for CBS from 1981 to 1986.
When CBS cut back on the documentary, he returned to PBS with less money. “If you have the skills to fold in your tent and get anywhere you have to go, you can follow the desires of your heart,” he once said.
Then in 1986 he and his wife, Judith Davidson Moyers, became their own bosses by not only creating programs such as the 10-hour “In Search of the Constitution,” but also forming a public relations television, an independent shop that paid them through their own fundraising efforts.
His projects in the 21st century included the weekly PBS public relations program “Now.” A new edition of “Bill Moyers Journal” and a podcast covering racism, voting rights and the rise of Donald Trump, among other subjects.
Moyers married college classmate Judith Davidson in 1954 and raised three children, including author Suzanne Moyers and author TV producer William Cope Moyers. Judith eventually became her husband’s partner, creative collaborator and president of the production company.
