Sad but true: Bill Moyers Journal has shuffled off the air and into the archives of PBS and the <a href=" Brief in Support of the Position of Amici Curiae 12.29.09 – “>Paley Center for Media. From a story in the Columbia Journalism Review:
In 1948, when he was fourteen years old, Bill Moyers heard Lyndon Johnson give a rousing speech at a courthouse in Marshall, Texas. Without a megaphone or a loudspeaker, LBJ mesmerized the crowd. “I remember the sheer presence of the man,” Moyers has recalled. “And I thought, ‘That’s what power is. And this man is reaching this audience. And he’s got this audience. And he’s telling this audience something that’s very important.’ ” Years later, through a different medium–television–Moyers would achieve a similar kind of power, and he has yet to abuse it. Moyers’s conversational ease, his earnest delivery, his fierce intelligence–all of it has transformed him into our leading television intellectual, and a worthy successor to Edward R. Murrow.
Yes, the former press secretary to one of the most reviled presidents of the 20th century — reviled especially by the left — has become one of the icons of the very same left that once chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?”
Moyers somehow escaped being tarnished with the disaster that was the Johnson Administration and went on to a career as a staple on PBS, playing the role of the Guilty White Southerner (he was born in Oklahoma, but raised in Texas); it’s a wonder he didn’t end up editing the New York Times. With his trademark combination of folksy unctuousness and schoolmarmish hectoring, he became the go-to guy for people who wanted to feel good about their best and most noble liberal impulses.
Here’s a snippet from his penultimate show. Be sure to stay tuned through the final montage of past guests articulating their vision of the “American Dream.” Note also the plug for the Frankfurt School’s Theodor Adorno, the “social-scientist” and music critic whose work, along with that of his “critical theory” colleagues, did so much to establish the ethos and mores of modern progressive America. Despite the shout-out to Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, that tells you where Moyers’ heart has been all along.
2yu2MvdTf7U
Lest we forget, this is how the Johnson Administration, for which Moyers so tirelessly flacked, came to an end:
2-FibDxpkb0
Four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis; two months later, Bobby Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles, and the worst year in American history was well and truly underway.