Bill Moyers Journal

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(05_SilverPri @ Apr 26 2007, 02:39 PM) [snapback]430747[/snapback]</div>

He runs a Foundation for Media and Democracy; hence I would expect its grants to go to groups acting on those aims (list from their latest 990 attached).

He's been a journalist all his life. He's been consistent. It's only because so much of the media has rolled over and played dead with the Bush admin, or become an active propaganda arm (Fox), that Moyers seems unusual. He's still functioning as a reporter, criticizing the government, as our free press is meant to do.

Moyers himself discusses this issue better than I can:

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.

Tomlinson actually told The Washington Post that he was irate over one of our documentary reports from a small town in Pennsylvania hard-hit by outsourcing.

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.

It is an old canard of right-wing ideologues like Tomlinson to equate tough journalism with liberalism. They hope to distract people from the message by trying to discredit the messenger.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6286824.html

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(05_SilverPri @ Apr 26 2007, 04:39 PM) [snapback]430747[/snapback]</div>

I'm sorry, I thought your question was one about ethical issues.

There's a big difference between Bill Moyers' Buying the War and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911.

Unlike Moore, Moyers tried to show that the Bush administration cynically and deviously manipulated the newsmedia and public by playing on their fears after the 9/11 attacks to rally support for an invasion that had no legitimate justification in a lucid, clear, logical, intelligent manner. It didn't look like it was designed for pure, mindless entertainment. If someone wants to call that 'biased', they're entitled to their opinion. I'm not sure 'bias' is the right word for it, though. It sounded a lot more like 'truth', to me.

But, hey, it's not like Bush got a blow-job in the oval office by an intern or anything, so it's all okay.