Moyers Has His SayFreePress
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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Iowans for Better Local TV - IBLTV.Org
