Bill Moyers: Broadcasting Pioneer, Press Critic & Public Intellectual - Part 2

Some have said the breadth of his experience has qualified Moyers for a run at the presidency. In writing his recommendation for the run in 2006, Ralph Nader offered a fairly comprehensive profile of Moyers that offers a good place for understanding his role as a public intellectual:

Moyers brings impressive credentials beyond his knowledge of the White House-Congressional complexes. He puts people first. Possessed of a deep sense of history relating to the great economic struggles in American history between workers and large companies and industries, Moyers today is a leading spokesman on the need to deconcentrate the manifold concentrations of political and economic power by global corporations. He is especially keen on doing something about media concentration about which he knows from recurrent personal experience as a television commentator, investigator, anchor and newspaper editor.

Some of his most famous quotes also shed great light into his belief set and interests:

"Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous." 

"Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of."

"Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people." 

"When I learn something new - and it happens every day - I feel a little more at home in this universe, a little more comfortable in the nest." 

"Democracy belongs to those who exercise it." 

"As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher." 

"Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism." 

"War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination."

Beyond steering the direction of BillMoyers.com -- an archive for his past work and a space for independent news and commentary -- Moyers serves as the president of the Schumann Media Center. It's an organization whose stated purpose is "to renew the democratic process through cooperative acts of citizenship, especially as they apply to governance and the environment." Past grant recipients include the controversial ACORN organization, socialist-oriented Mother Jones, and the Sierra Club.

His role as president has run him into some trouble, as he's been criticized on more than one occasion for his failure to disclose the center's monetary support for many of the subjects he featured in his programming.

The other main source of Moyers' controversy have been his progressive views. The liberal bias he supposedly imparted on PBS so upset former Corporation of Public Broadcasting chairman Kenneth Tomlinson that he secretly launched an investigation into his programming to try to get him off the air. Instead it was Tomlinson that would lose his job.

In suggesting that perhaps he's become more liberal over time, Moyers says, "I've lived long enough to see the triumph of zealots and absolutists, to watch money swallow politics, to witness the rise of the corporate state. I didn't drift. I moved left just by standing still."

After 43 years as the face of public television and a crusader for everything from socioeconomics to religion, Moyers continues to uphold the mission of the public intellectual. "If my work doesn’t speak for itself after all these years," he told The Washington Post after announcing his third (and he insists, final) retirement from public broadcasting, "I have failed and no amount of interpretation can help."