Twenty Years Ago
Since January 2014, Whatcom Watch has been reprinting articles from issues printed 20 years ago. The below articles appeared in the July 2005 issue of Whatcom Watch.
Editor’s Note: With the proposed elimination of federal funding for NPR and PBS currently in the news, this article from twenty years ago appeared at an opportune time. This reprint contains portions of the article. The complete article is on the Whatcom Watch website.
by Bill Moyers
The following is an essay adapted from Bill Moyers’ speech to the National Conference for Media Reform on May 15, 2005. The event in St. Louis was organized and hosted by Free Press.
The story I’d like to share with you goes to the core of our belief that the quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined. Public media is now under attack, as am I, by the right-wing media and their allies at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
CPB was established almost 40 years ago to set broad policy for public broadcasting and to be a firewall between political influence and program content. What some on this board are now doing today, led by its chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, is too important, too disturbing, and, yes, even too dangerous not to address. We’re seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age-old ambition of power and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.
I take in stride attacks by the radical right-wingers who have not given up demonizing me although I retired over six months ago. They’ve been after me for years now and I suspect they will be stomping on my grave to make sure I don’t come back from the dead. I should put my detractors on notice: They might just compel me out of the rocking chair and back into the anchor chair.
Who Are They?
Who are they? They are the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. They are the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmad Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil. They are the people who turn faith-based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets. They are the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.
And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s okay to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.
I’m in hot water because my colleagues and I at “NOW” didn’t play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.
I decided long ago that this wasn’t healthy for democracy. I came to see that “news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.” In my documentaries — whether on the Watergate scandals 30 years ago or the Iran-Contra conspiracy 20 years ago or Bill Clinton’s fundraising scandals 10 years ago or, five years ago, the chemical industry’s long and despicable cover-up of its cynical and unspeakable withholding of critical data about its toxic products from its workers, I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.
“NOW” With Bill Moyers Created After 9/11
When PBS asked me after 9/11 to start a new weekly broadcast entitled “NOW,” they wanted us to make it different from anything else on the air — commercial or public broadcasting. They asked us to tell stories no one else was reporting and to offer a venue to people who might not otherwise be heard.
But we also had a second priority. We intended to do strong, honest and accurate reporting, telling stories we knew people in high places wouldn’t like. I told our producers and correspondents that, in our field reporting our job was to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth. This was all the more imperative in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. America could be entering a long war against an elusive and stateless enemy with no definable measure of victory and no limit to its duration, cost or foreboding fear.
History Repeating Itself – Sound Familiar?
Nixon vetoed the authorization for CPB with a message written in part by his sidekick Pat Buchanan, who in a private memo had castigated Vanocur, MacNeil, Washington Week in Review, Black Journal and Bill Moyers as “unbalanced against the administration.”
It does sound familiar.
Buchanan and Nixon succeeded in cutting CPB funding for all public affairs programming except for Black Journal. They knocked out multiyear funding for the National Public Affairs Center for Television, otherwise known as NPACT. And they voted to take away from the PBS staff the ultimate responsibility for the production of programming.
But in those days, there were still Republicans in America who did not march in ideological lockstep and who stood on principle against politicizing public television. The chairman of the public station in Dallas was an industrialist named Ralph Rogers, a Republican (but no party hack), who saw the White House intimidation as an assault on freedom of the press and led a nationwide effort to stop it.
The chairman of CPB was former Republican Congressman Thomas Curtis, who was also a principled man. He resigned, claiming White House interference. Within a few months, the crisis was over. CPB maintained its independence, PBS grew in strength and Richard Nixon would soon face impeachment and resign for violating the public trust, not just public broadcasting.
Paradoxically, the very National Public Affairs Center for Television that Nixon had tried to kill — NPACT — put PBS on the map by rebroadcasting in primetime each day’s Watergate hearings, drawing huge ratings night after night and establishing PBS as an ally of democracy. We should still be doing that sort of thing.
That was 33 years ago. I thought the current CPB board would like to hear and talk about the importance of standing up to political interference. I was wrong. They wouldn’t meet with me. I tried three times. And it was all downhill after that.
Kenneth Tomlinson Crossed the Line
I was naive, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. But that’s what Kenneth Tomlinson has done.
On Fox News in May, he denied that he’s carrying out a White House mandate or that he’s ever had any conversations with any Bush administration official about PBS. But The New York Times reported that he enlisted Karl Rove to help kill a proposal that would have put on the CPB board people with experience in local radio and television.
The Times also reported that “on the recommendation of administration officials,” Tomlinson hired a White House flack (I know the genre) named Mary Catherine Andrews as a senior CPB staff member. While she was still reporting to Karl Rove at the White House, Andrews set up CPB’s new ombudsman’s office. And only a few weeks ago did we learn that Tomlinson had spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias.
_______________________________________________
When this speech was given, Bill Moyers was the president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy.
