Moyers closed the National Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis on Sunday with his first public response to the revelation that White House allies on the board of directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have secretly been holding PBS in general -- and his show in particular -- to a partisan litmus test.
Recalling former President Richard Nixon's failed attempt to cut the funding for public broadcasting in the early 1970s, Moyers said, "I always knew that Nixon would be back -- again and again. I just didn't know that this time he would ask to be the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Moyers was even blunter about why he thought Tomlinson and other allies of the administration were so determined to knock his groundbreaking news program off the air and to replace it with more conservative fare such as a weekly roundtable discussion featuring Wall Street Journal editorial page staffers. Joking that, "I thought public television was supposed to be an alternative to commercial media, not a funder of it," Moyers spoke of the investigative reporting NOW did on everything from the war in
Iraq to offshore tax havens and ownership of the media and said, "Our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn't the party line."
In short, Moyers said, "We were getting it right, but not right wing." And that, he explained, was too much for Trent Lott, Ann Coulter and other ideologues who he said want media to feed the American people "the junk food of propaganda."
Click here to download an mp3 of Bill Moyers' speech
No comments:
Post a Comment