Pharisees, Sadducees and Caesar Surrogates: Bill Moyers on the "Librul" Media

God bless Bill Moyers. Excerpts from his closing address at the National Conference for Media Reform this weekend follow below.

Democracy Now! | Bill Moyers Responds to CPB's Tomlinson Charges of Liberal Bias: "We Were Getting it Right, But Not Right Wing".

The story I’ve come to share with you goes to the core of our belief that the quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined. I can tell this story because I’ve been living it. As Dr. Wilson said, it’s been in the news this week, including more tax on a single journalist, yours truly, by the right wing media and their friends at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As you know, CPB was established almost forty years ago to set broad policy for public broadcasting and to be a firewall between political influence and program content. What some on its board are now doing today, led by its chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, is too important, too disturbing, and yes, even dangerous for a gathering like this not to address it. We’re seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age old ambition of power and ideology to squelch -- to punish the journalist who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.

First, let me assure you that 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 point out to them that one of our boys pulled it off some two thousand years ago after the Pharisees, the Sadducees and Caesar surrogates thought they had shut him up for good. I won’t be expecting that kind of miracle, but I should put my detractors on notice, they might just compel me out of the rocking chair and back into the anchor chair.

Oh please, oh please, oh please!!

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control using the government to threaten and intimidate; I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class to make sure Ahmad Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil; I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into Karl Rove’s slush fund; who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets; I mean 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. That’s who I mean.

Behold righteous prose! It's a beautiful thing. People "who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets"... perfection.

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.

Can anyone refute the simple elegance of that logic?

Read more! Truth-telling like this in abundance:

...(T)he rules of the game permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.

My God, the truth sounds revolutionary, doesn't it? [Swooning.]

UPDATE: Brian R.'s got a link to an mp3 and a MOV video file of Moyers' speech here. It's worth it!

Comments

[Erudite Redneck]

Beautiful! I love Bill Moyers. He is my kind of Baptist. Linked!

[handdrummer]

God, you can just hear the man's plain spoken ringing voice right in the words on the page.

I vote we draft Bill Moyers for President! Want to form a committee?

[handdrummer]

also linked by the way.

[Brian R.]

He made me cry. What a SPEECH! WOW! Check out the links to an MP3 and MOV video file on my blog post.

[ae]

ER, my kind of Baptist, indeed! Would that we had more like him of all persuasions. Thanks for dropping in and for the link!

handdrummer, I am so with you! Let's pool our pennies and get some petitions going. If Dim Son could be "elected" to anything (actually, I'm not sure that he's ever been truly "elected" to anything), dear, smart -- and Baptist, as Erudite Redneck reminds us -- Bill Moyers should win in a cakewalk. Dammit, do we have to hire Karl Rove though?

Hey, Brian R.! Thanks for the link. I'll put it up front. Moyers' is an increasingly important and heartening voice during these insane times. Bless him. I hope his integirty and strength of conviction strongly influence other decision makers.

[pbswatcher]

"Kenneth Tomlinson has his demanding donors. I’ll take the widow’s mite any day." I'll start believing him, as well as take him up on his offer, when he says he would rather have the $500 than the $400 million from Uncle Sam. See Raging Bill