The NPR afternoon show Talk of the Nation brought on currently retired PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers to pontificate on May 23, but host Neal Conan took the opportunity to read a long excerpt trashing conservative principles as "eyewash" and the difference between Republicans and Democrats as miniscule.
This was an easy setup for Moyers, who agreed that the Democrats are "not the progressive or liberal party" any more because of its major corporate donors. Naturally, Moyers also attacked conservative critics of public broadcasting as opponents of "independence" in journalism:
NEAL CONAN: Bill Moyers is at our bureau in New York. I'd like to continue you left off, with another reading from your book, this an interview you did with Andrew Bacevich, the military historian. And he says: “One of the great lies about American politics is that Democrats genuinely subscribe to a core - a set of core convictions that make Democrats different from Republicans. And the same thing, of course, applies to the other party.
“It's not true. I happen to define myself as a conservative, but when you look back over the last 30-or-so years, said to have been a conservative era in American politics, did we get small government? Did we get balanced budgets? Do we have serious, as opposed to simply rhetorical, attention to traditional societal values? The answer is no. The truth is that conservative principles have been eyewash, part of a package of tactics that Republicans employ to get elected and then to stay in office.”
Do you believe that there are any significant distinctions any more between the two parties?
MOYERS: There are distinctions on ideology. Democrats, as a - in essence believe in a social contract, believe in a government that's supposed to be about workaday people. They forfeited that commitment a long time ago, when in the 1980s they begin to take money from the same corporate sources that are the main funders of the Republican Party. And while there are exceptions to the rule, the Democratic Party as a whole does its obeisance to Wall Street and to corporations and to other wealth interests.
The big change in the parties in my time, since I was in the Kennedy- Johnson administration in the 1960s to 1967, is that the Republican Party has become the conservative party. The Democratic Party has not become the progressive or liberal party because it's so beholden for its funding from so many of very wealthy sources.
In most respects, neither part has a great deal of empathy for working people or for poor people, and as a result of that, Neal, I think over the last 30 years, we've become a society divided between winners and losers, with little pity for the latter. And that's the - if there's a message to the book of all of these interviews, although they're all on different subjects, it is that democracy's in trouble. Oligarchy, as Simon Johnson said, looms. The odds are against us, but as Howard Zinn, the great late historian says in the interview I did with him right before his death, we cannot give up.
Democracy is a struggle that demands - is a life that demands contract struggle against the powers that be.
For anti-PBS conservatives, PBS is part of the "powers that be," powers that slam conservatives and refuse to give them air time for a rebuttal. Conan's reading lacked context. In 2008, Bacevich wrote for The American Conservative magazine on "the conservative case for Barack Obama," in which he claimed, "But this much we can say for certain: electing John McCain guarantees the perpetuation of war. The nation’s heedless march toward empire will continue." One might think Bacevich would be disappointed by the Afghanistan-surging, Libyan-war-waging Obama.
The NPR interview also turned into a campaign against conservative critics urging removal of the taxpayer subsidies to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting:
SCOTT: Yeah, forgive me. I've admired your career for years and had the pleasure of meeting you at the Philosophical Society of Texas meeting in 1995. And I wanted to ask you, since one will probably not be enough, if you could tell us the two times that you've felt that you've had to be very courageous as a journalist.
MOYERS: Oh, I don't - you know, it's hard to think of yourself that way. Of course, I've been attacked many times. Richard Nixon tried to do away with public broadcasting, the funding of public television back in the mid-'70s, when he came after me and Bob - Robert MacNeil, who had come on the air, and Sander Vanocur because of the Watergate investigations and other investigative work going on at that time.
And then, of course, Newt Gingrich came after me and after us, us being public television, in 1994 and 1995 and then under George W. Bush, his - the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting singled me out as a nemesis because I was trying to report what was going on in Iraq and trying to look at what was happening behind the scenes as they spun the propaganda on invading Iraq.
Those don't take particular courage. They take independence, and they take an organization that will stand behind you when you are attacked. And it took courage for Pat Mitchell, then the president of PBS, to stand behind me, until it turned out the chairman of CPB [conservative Ken Tomlinson] had to resign for a lot of reasons, many of which were uncovered by his own inspector general at the CPB. [In short, Tomlinson dared to suggest a liberal bias.]
It took - in the mid-'70s, when the Nixon White House, with Pat Buchanan, came after public broadcasting, it didn't take us courage. It took courage for Ralph Rogers, who was a Republican industrialist from Dallas, to stand and defend public broadcasting and beat back that challenge from his own party. It's the people who defend independent media, the board of National Public Radio, the CEO of National Public Radio, that make it possible for Neal and people like me to do our work as journalists, with the chips falling where they may. It doesn't take particular courage on our part.
SCOTT: Thank you, Mr. Moyers.
CONAN: Thanks, Scott, for the call, which leads to a question: public television. We'll deal with public radio later, maybe, but public television is struggling financially. It has not been able to replicate the kinds of successes that it has had in the past. It does not play the kind of role many would like it to see it play in American broadcasting. Do you see much of a future for public television?
MOYERS: I think all television is changing radically under the rise of, you know, Internet and all the digital venues and so forth. I think public radio has a far more promising future than public television because: A, public television is expensive, I mean television is expensive to produce; B, people's habits are changing.L ook at the grid in the New York Times or the Washington Post or any other newspaper every day, and you see so much that's offered there, it's hard for public television to find its identity.
But it's still very important, Neal. I was present at the creation of public broadcasting in - the Carnegie Commission on Public Broadcasting was delivered to my desk when I was a policy advisor to Lyndon Johnson. And when he signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, I had gone. I was publisher of Newsday then. But he made one of the great speeches about the media in American history, talking about the need for there to be one channel free of commercial values and free of commercials so that the integrity of the artist, the credibility of the journalist, could be protected.
We need public television more than ever because it is free, on the whole, of commercial values and commercials. But unless we can find an independent source of revenue, a trust fund of $1 to $2 billion, we're not going to be able to survive because it takes money to create television programs.
So the amount we get from Congress, from the taxpayers, is really very small, 17, 18 percent. We pay a big price for that because of the heavy breathing on our necks any time we do something that's controversial. But we've got to find a way to create this medium, which mingles the visual and the lingual, the linguistic, in a unique way. There is no substitute for the dance of the image and the word when you get them right on television.
There you have it -- just another opportunity for liberals to trash conservatives on NPR without rebuttal.
