October 19, 2004|PATRICK GOLDSTEIN New York — Judging from the way the Bush political machine has allowed only people who sign affidavits of support to attend his campaign events, it seems unlikely that George W. Bush would ever subject himself to being interrogated by Bill Moyers, one of his most persistent and persuasive critics. But if the unthinkable happened, what would the host of PBS' "Now With Bill Moyers" ask him?
I put the veteran broadcaster on the spot when we sat down to talk recently, figuring the man who'd interviewed everyone from Joseph Campbell to Maurice Sendak to Ronald Reagan might conjure up a question that no one else in our overpopulated media universe had thought to ask. I wasn't disappointed. Formulated between nibbles on a salad in the green room of the "Now" studios here in lower Manhattan, Moyers' response illustrates why the genteel 70-year-old journalist remains a beacon of intellectual clarity amid the tsunami of trash-talking bilge that passes for journalism in today's vast 500-channel wasteland.
"I'd like to ask the president how is it that you can grow up well loved and well taught and well bred and be so unaware of other people's reality?" Moyers said. "How can privilege come to be a source of isolation so powerful that it prevents you from knowing the hurts and needs and hopes of others?"
It quickly became clear that Moyers -- who will leave "Now" in December to make documentaries and write a book about his years as an aide to Lyndon Baines Johnson -- was puzzling over how two born-again Texans such as Bush and himself could've taken such separate paths in life. "I guess I'd like to know: Why did the president, after he had his born-again experience, go into serving the powerful and the privileged instead of the people who are left out of the American bounty?" Moyers said. "It says something about the power of religion to reinforce our circumstantial benefits or distort our vision that we could have come from the same place and yet gone in such different directions."
As Moyers once said of himself, "I am a journalist, but I am also a pilgrim." The ordained Baptist minister-turned-TV commentator has always been ready and willing to wrestle with the big spiritual issues of the time. When "Now" arrived in January 2002, Moyers found a new pulpit to preach from. Clearly angered by how the renewal of civic values in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks had been plundered by what he calls "wartime opportunists -- the mercenaries of Washington, the lobbyists, lawyers and political fundraisers," Moyers has used "Now" as a razor-sharp scythe for laying bare issues rarely scrutinized by his media peers.
With Moyers and co-host David Brancaccio at the helm, "Now's" team of reporters has regularly put the rest of the media to shame, pursuing stories few others bother to touch. Its first broadcast offered a devastating report on the secret meetings Vice President Dick Cheney had with a host of energy and oil company officials. Since then, the show, which airs Fridays at 8 p.m. on KCET-TV, has spotlighted all sorts of corporate shenanigans, exposed (with ABC News' Brian Ross) the lavish parties corporations hosted at this summer's political conventions and skewered local TV news' failure to cover political issues (in San Francisco, the first time a Republican candidate for state Assembly made it on the local news was when she was in a car crash). Before the presidential debates this fall, "Now" examined how the debates had been "rigged" by the Commission on Presidential Debates, a corporate-sponsored group created by the two major political parties that established rules, by secret contract, preventing candidates from questioning each other and audience members from asking follow-up questions in the town-hall forum.
Moyers' interest in far-flung topics is felt in the breadth of "Now" stories. The newsmagazine went to Israel to explore the influence Christian Zionists have had on the Bush White House's Middle East policy, complete with an eye-popping clip of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), before the Israeli parliament, declaring "I stand before you today in solidarity, as an Israeli at heart." It traveled to a small mountain meadow in Colorado where a scientist studying global warming has simulated the climate we'll have in 50 years, producing sagebrush where lupine used to grow. And "Now" visited Mississippi, where Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, in an effort to cure the state's budget woes, has cut Medicaid coverage for thousands of poor elderly residents, including cancer victims, dialysis patients and the mentally disabled, while refusing to raise the state's tobacco tax, currently one of the nation's lowest at 18 cents a pack.
