There is only One Big Beautiful Bill – Bill Moyers. The broadcaster, documentarian and best-selling author passed away June 26 at 91. His death comes as the power grab disguised as the One Big Beautiful Bill moves before The United States Senate. Two Bills could not be more dissimilar.
Moyers started his career deeply involved in federal politics. In the 1960s, he served as a White House Press Secretary under President Lyndon Johnson and had a hand in the formation of The Peace Corps. Later he became very involved in creating America’s public broadcasting system – an institution greatly under attack by the current White House.
Moyers later joined CBS News, first as an editor and chief correspondent and in the 1980s as a commentator for The Evening News with Dan Rather. By 1986, he’d had enough of what he saw as CBS’s “declining news standards” and threw his energies into creating documentaries and series for PBS.
Later in life, Moyers was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame and also won a Lifetime Emmy Award. During his career, he racked up 26 Emmy nominations, winning 13 awards.
Did he see the whole Trump era coming? In 2003, he told BuzzFlash.com that, “The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they’ve won.” He feared back then that the “inequality gap is the widest it’s been since 1929; the middle class is besieged and the working poor are barely keeping their heads above water.” Decades before Musk and DOGE, he warned that “corporate and governing elites are helping themselves to the spoils of victory,” adding that access to political power has become “who gets what and who pays for it.”
Moyers was a hero to many, including US Senator Bernie Sanders. Upon news of Moyers’ death, Sanders saluted him as “a friend, public servant, and outstanding journalist.” Sanders pointed out that, as an aide to President Johnson, “Bill pushed the presidency in a more progressive direction. As a journalist, he had the courage to explore issues that many ignored.”
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Moyers railed against what he saw as a “media circus” that was too corporately structured and prone to becoming “neutered or politicized for partisan purposes.” What he saw as the biggest story of our time, he told the AP News Service in 2004, was that “the right-wing media has become a partisan propaganda arm of the Republican National Committee.”
I interviewed Moyers way too early in my career as a fledgling writer at TV Guide Canada. My memory of that occasion is that Moyers was friendly and very tolerant of one so green.
For a profoundly articulate exchange between a seasoned writer and Moyers, turn to an article written 35 years ago by Ray Bennett. Ray, a friend from those TV Guide days and now retired and living in his native England, praises Moyers’ 1971 book “Listening to America: A Traveler Rediscovers His Country.” Writes Bennett, Moyers saw then that “civilization is a thin veneer of cooperation above a seething ocean of conflict, self-interest, fear and chaos. It is a fragile crust, he suggests, that can be destroyed under the boot of ignorance, prejudice and meanness as easily as the crust of life on the surface of the planet.”
Follow this link to read the rest of Ray Bennett’s article about Bill Moyers. Condolences to Mr. Moyers’ family, friends and all who believe in critical thought and freedom of speech.
