First appeared in the Boston Globe.
www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/10/15/qa_bill_moyers_bill_moyers
By Harvey Blume
THE TELEPHONE ISN'T my favorite means of
communicating," Bill Moyers noted, after scheduling conflicts compelled us
to speak by phone. "I like to see the other person's face."
That gave me insight into the sometimes alarmingly intent
expression Moyers wears in the PBS interviews he's been doing for more than 30
years: He's not merely listening, but studying his interviewee, trying to take
in the whole person.
Tomlinson, in any case, has since resigned, and Moyers is
back on PBS full throttle with three new documentaries airing this month.
"Capitol Crimes," which premiered Oct. 4, disentangles the Jack
Abramoff scandal. "Is God Green?" (Oct. 11) depicts the rise of
Bible-based environmentalism. "The Net at Risk" (airing this
Wednesday night) asks if Net neutrality--broadly defined as equal access to the
Internet--will survive Congress rewriting the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
(See pbs.org/moyers for local listings and streaming video of all three
programs.)
Moyers worries that big money is squeezing the life out of
democratic processes, often citing Scripture as it does. But unlike many others
with muckraking zeal, he's no enemy of organized religion: He's an ordained
Baptist minister and a regular churchgoer. Moyers's passion for democratic
values, combined with his respect for religion, gives him an unusually wide
lens to turn on America.
IDEAS: Over the years, you've made plenty of documentaries.
But it seems your most popular pieces--for example, the "Power of
Myth" series with Joseph Campbell--just show "talking heads,"
two people talking. Why are those shows so popular?
MOYERS: I do not really understand why what you call
"talking heads" seem to have an impact that survives. But the fact of
the matter is that the most important communication we have is face to face.
IDEAS: What impact do you hope your reporting on the
Abramoff scandal will have?
MOYERS: I grew up reading the New Testament, where it is
said: You shall know the truth, the truth shall make you free. But you don't
know, if you report the truth, that anything will change. You hope that at
least the people who watch will know more than they did before.
IDEAS: It's discouraging, though, that "Capitol
Crimes" ends with a shot of the K Street sign in Washington, D.C., and you
saying "On K Street, business goes on--as usual."
MOYERS: But it's a fact. The nation hasn't spent a lot of
time coming to grips with Abramoff. The Congress hasn't. The House immediately
introduced placebo reforms. Once the ethics committee started getting close to
Tom DeLay, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert neutered the ethics committee.
This is a story a lot of people have simply yawned at.
IDEAS: Why?
MOYERS: Well, coverups don't make it easy to report things.
We know about Abramoff because of a few people who blew the whistle, including
Jeff Smith, a reporter for The Washington Post. Smith had been abroad for five
years, and when he came back couldn't believe how much Washington had changed.
He looked into why, discovered the K Street Project, and said to his
colleagues: Why aren't you on this? They just yawned--business as usual.
IDEAS: You came back to PBS this June with a seven-part
series called "Faith and Reason." "Capitol Crimes" and
"Is God Green?" take up faith again, showing, in the first case, how
it can disguise greed, and in the second, how it can empower people. Is there
any room in your work for purely secular culture?
MOYERS: The third documentary in this trilogy, "The Net
at Risk," has nothing to do with faith. It is about the fact that 10 years
ago Congress carved up the media landscape in the Telecommunications Act of
1996, allowing increased conglomeration of ownership. Almost nothing was known
about it at the time. The big media companies didn't cover it, and didn't want
it covered.
Now they'll be rewriting the Telecommunications Act. If the
big companies have their way, in the dark of the night behind closed doors,
they will gain the power to own not only the pipes of the Internet but what
goes into those pipes. Giving control of content and access to big corporations
will mean that the Internet, the most revolutionary democratic phenomenon of
our time, where all of us are equal, will slip through our fingers. I did this
documentary to say, Hey people, pay attention. Something is about to happen
that will be very hard to change.
IDEAS: Have you become more radical over the years?
MOYERS: Radical in the sense of returning to the roots of
the American experience, maybe, as in Thomas Paine radical. What I find is that
money has become the common denominator of politics. Both parties have become
its servants. And I've seen it get worse; I've seen our democracy become
paralyzed by the influence of big money. I did "Capitol Crimes"
because I want people to know the magnitude it has reached.
In other ways, I'm a conservative. I've been married to the
same woman for 52 years. I'm a regular at church. I am a believer.
IDEAS: Have you ever felt like you were being pushed out of
PBS?
MOYERS: A friend from the Lyndon Johnson years recently
reminded me that when he got on the board of the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting in 1969, they were talking about how to get rid of Bill Moyers.
IDEAS: What does that say about PBS?
MOYERS: It's a place where if you fight you can survive, but
it's not easy. The fact of the matter is that Kenneth Tomlinson had a chilling
effect down the line.
IDEAS: It's been said that you have the oratorical flair of
a preacher. Does your religious faith help fuel your political passion?
MOYERS: I don't see it that way. At an Emmy Awards recently,
I said I want to thank the First Amendment. Faith in the First Amendment, not a
theological belief system, keeps me going as a journalist.
Let me put it this way: I was press secretary in the Johnson
administration when we circled the wagons and mocked reporting from Vietnam
from the likes of David Halberstam--with terrible consequences for Vietnam and
America. We let ideology blind us to the facts on the ground. That's the
driving force in my work, to never let it happen again.
Harvey Blume is a writer based in Cambridge.
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