Bill Moyers “has directed funding to numerous media outlets on the left: the Washington Monthly, the Nation, Mother Jones, In These Times” and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes documented in a lengthy expose in this week’s magazine.
In addition, while Moyers condemns how, in Hayes’ words, “big companies — with help from Washington conservatives, including President Bush — are using public vehicles to enhance their private interests,” Moyers is doing the same by having his foundation give grants for PBS programs to promote his liberal issue agenda.
Hayes also discovered how Columbia Journalism Review, which effusively praised Moyers a few months ago as the “leading television intellectual,” recently pocketed a $2 million grant from the foundation controlled by Moyers.
An excerpt from “PBS's Televangelist: Bill Moyers preaches on…and on” in the February 25 Weekly Standard.
That’s barely a third of the article. There’s plenty more good stuff I left out. Click here to read the Hayes piece in full.
(This update courtesy of the Media Research Center.)
When PBS executives asked themselves the question so many Americans asked after the September 11 attacks — what can we do? — their answer was obvious: Bill Moyers. We can give America Bill Moyers. Lots of Bill Moyers….
Moyers agreed to create what became “Now with Bill Moyers,” an open-ended series of weekly, hour-long, primetime shows that debuted on January 18….
[T]he choice of Moyers to lead a national reflection in the wake of September 11 was strange. Moyers hardly qualifies as politically nonaligned, a neutral moderator respectful of all sides….
Moyers's difficulty conversing with people on the right seems to have impaired his ability to report their opinions fairly, particularly on issues of race. “The right gets away with blaming liberals for their efforts to help the poor, but what the right is really objecting to is the fact that the poor are primarily black,” he told [Eric] Alterman….
An address he delivered to a gathering at the LBJ library in Austin, Texas, on January 4 offers an instructive sample of his thinking. It elaborates what has become a favorite theme: Democracy is threatened not only by terrorism but also by the sinister forces of money and the market….
Big companies — with help from Washington conservatives, including President Bush — are using public vehicles to enhance their private interests, Moyers argued. Worse, he said, they're doing it in the name of those who died on September 11. A “mercenary crowd in Washington” is exploiting the terrorist attacks to enrich themselves. Moyers singled out Rep. Dick Armey, who opposed government-paid health insurance for laid off airline workers, as serving the interests of corporate types who contribute mainly to Republicans. Said Moyers, “Mr. Armey and his band of true believers went along.”
Moyers eventually connected “right-wingers” with bin Laden by suggesting that the Bush administration is more interested in protecting its wealthy contributors than in fighting “terrorists' dirty money.” The passage deserves to be quoted in full:
“Last year, a year ago this month, the right-wingers at the Heritage Foundation in Washington teamed up with deep pocket bankers, some of whom support the Heritage Foundation, to stop the United States from cracking down on terrorist money havens. I'm not making this up, it's all on the record….The president of the powerful Heritage Foundation spent an hour with Treasury Secretary O'Neill, Texas bankers pulled their strings at the White House, and, Presto!, the Bush administration pulled out of the global campaign to crack down on dirty money. How about that for patriotism? Better terrorists get their dirty money than tax cheaters be prevented from evading national law. And this from people who wrap themselves in the flag and sing 'America the Beautiful' with tears in their eyes. Bitter? Yes.”
….[U]pon closer examination, some of Moyers's “facts” aren't what they seem. According to a report by the Treasury Department, none of the money that financed the terrorists has been traced to the so-called tax havens; much of al Qaeda's banking was done in countries like Germany, Great Britain, and even the United States….
The first several episodes of “Now with Bill Moyers” develop the theme of the dual threat to American democracy, from terrorism and money….
The second show took up where the first one left off, with a lengthy Enron segment recycled from another PBS show, “Frontline.” In a tip of the hat to ideological balance, Moyers interviewed Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, badgering him about why the paper doesn't consider Enron another Whitewater. And Moyers returned to the subject of tax havens that he says benefited “the terrorists.”…
One need not be a campaign finance reform zealot to find unpalatable some of the subsidy-seeking by industries and money-grubbing by individuals after September11….
Still, it seemed odd that these accusations should come from Moyers, who has himself made so many programs since September 11. When I approached Moyers to discuss the series and elucidate their funding, I was told he couldn't talk….
So I sent him a fax. I didn't come up with this idea on my own. Last February, the American Chemical Council had resorted to faxing back and forth with Moyers when he was working on an expose of the industry….
Weekly Standard excerpt (continued)
I tried one more time to reach him. “One piece of information I am hoping you can provide me,” I wrote in my faxed letter, “is how much money your company Public Affairs Television has made in post-September 11 public television.” Surely he wouldn't be lobbing those rocks at the “mercenary crowd in Washington” from the front porch of a glass house.
Moyers called two hours later. He apologized for not calling sooner, and we had a brief chat. I asked him about the money.
“I've never discussed my earnings in public,” he said, clearly agitated that anyone would ask about them. “I'm not a publicly held company, I'm a small independent producer who makes a reasonable income.”
If he's criticizing others for exploiting September 11 for a buck, I ask, isn't it fair to inquire how much he'll earn for his work on these public television broadcasts?
“I didn't say the questions were unfair,” he said. Still, he wouldn't answer them. Finally, he said he simply doesn't know how much he's made. “I actually don't know.” Much of the work, he suspects, may have even been done pro bono….
When I asked Moyers if he sees any irony in the fact that he's a wealthy man owing in no small part to his long association with public television, the MVP of PBS told me that he's no different from any other public servant — fireman, policeman, or teacher. But when I reminded him that their salaries are matters of public record, he once again reverted to the status of private contractor….
Though he’d be loath to admit it, given his frequent complaints about media consolidation, Moyers has become something of a clandestine media magnate. He quietly earns $200,000 a year as president of the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, which has assets of $90 million-plus. From that nice perch, which he has held since 1990, he has sought to influence public debate in three main areas: the environment, “effective government” (i.e. campaign finance reform), and “independent media.” Moyers has directed funding to numerous media outlets on the left: the Washington Monthly, the Nation, Mother Jones, In These Times, TomPaine.com (run by Moyers's son John), and, most generously, the American Prospect. In some cases, this support runs well into the millions.
What his work with the foundation makes clear is this: Moyers isn't opposed in principle to buying influence. He just insists it be done in what he sees as the public interest. And he's very specific about that.
For example, a 1994 grant for $52,000 supported “a detailed report in The Washington Monthly on the influence of selected lobbyists in Washington.” A 1997 grant for $100,000 went to Mother Jones for “promoting important money-in-politics investigations” by the magazine….
These gifts to private magazines or foundations associated with them aren't a big deal. True, they make Moyers look a little silly in his oft-repeated public proclamations that he has “no agenda.” But, as he reminded me several times in our short chat, he can do whatever he wants as a citizen — he has First Amendment rights….
Things get a little sticky, though, when we consider Moyers's grants to public television and radio. His $42,000 to WETA “to support a series of special features on money in politics to run four consecutive weeks in the Fall of 1997 on the PBS program 'Washington Week in Review.'” Or, that same year, $296,500 “to fund production of three 15-minute segments for the 'PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer' on campaign finance reform.” Still in 1997, $127,000 to NPR “to support the special 'Money, Power and Influence' reporting position” and another $100,000 to “support an additional reporter to cover the 'Money, Power and Influence' beat outside the Beltway.”…
The list, as they say, goes on. A “Frontline” documentary on campaign financing for the small fee of $200,000 in 1995….
And when nasty conservatives suggest that all of this reinforces a left-leaning public affairs bias at PBS? Or that public broadcasting in America is for sale? Just give $15,000 to help Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting run an op-ed ad “in support of the independence of public television.” As Moyers might say, I'm not making this up.
On his own shows, Moyers frequently draws on the “expertise” of the interest groups he funds through his foundation. In 1999, all of this back-scratching caught up with him when an enterprising reporter from Knight Ridder named Frank Greve pointed out Moyers's duplicity.
“No TV journalist has reported more aggressively on the influence of money in American politics than Bill Moyers,” wrote Greve. “His triple roles as journalist, advocate and financier have made Moyers one of the nation's most influential champions of tighter restrictions on campaign contributions. In fact, with the Senate set to begin debate on campaign finance this week, Moyers is using his control over money and media to influence public policy in ways that would be the envy of the special interests he deplores.”…
These apparent conflicts have nicked Moyers's reputation, perhaps, but they haven't kept him from winning effusive praise from the nation's television writers and earning dozens of broadcast journalism awards over the course of his career. He won the prestigious Alfred I. DuPont/Columbia University Gold Baton award for 1998-99, honoring a documentary on South Africa. And the Columbia Journalism Review, in a Moyers tribute for its fortieth anniversary issue this winter, gushed, “Moyers's conversational ease, his earnest delivery, his fierce intelligence — all of it has transformed him into our leading television intellectual, and a worthy successor to Edward R. Murrow.” Moyers has been “an invaluable presence on television” and remains “one of our most astute press critics.” In sum, “serious journalism is Moyers's legacy to us.”
Moyers left another legacy to the Columbia Journalism Review, this one undisclosed. It's the serious funding his foundation has provided for years, including a recent $2 million grant to help “save” — his word — the publication that praises him so effusively.
