Legendary journalist Bill Moyers – a former White House press secretary for President Lyndon B. Johnson who continued to become one of the most respected television voices – died on Thursday. He was 91 years old.
Moyer’s son William said his father died at the Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York after a “long illness”.
His seven-decades-old journalism career traversed newspapers, including as Newsday publisher-based Long Island, and television on CBS and PBS-where he won more than 30 Emmy, 11 George Foster Peabody Awards, three George Polks and two Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia University Award for Excellence Award Excellence in transmission of journalism.
He was also a more selling author, a Baptist youth minister and a deputy director of the Peace Corps.
But it was for the public television that he produced some of the most cerebral and provocative TV series. In hundreds of hours of PBS programs, he treated subjects ranging from government corruption to modern dancing, from drug addiction to media consolidation, from religion to environmental abuse.
In 1988, Moyers produced the “Secret Government” for the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration and at the same time published a book under the same name. Around that time, he galvanized viewers with “Joseph Campbell and the power of myth”, a series of six one-hour interviews with the prominent religious researcher. The accompanying book became a better seller.
His television conversations with the poet Robert Bly almost began the movement of men of the 1990s, and his 1993 series “Healing and Mind” had a profound impact on the medical community and medical education.
Moyers was included in the 1995 television fame hall.
(Soft) talking the truth to power
Demonstrating what someone called “a gentle, tasting style” with the emphasis of the Texas that he never lost, Moyers was a humanist who investigated the world with a quiet, reasoned perspective, regardless of the topic.
From some neighborhoods, he exploded as a liberal thanks for his links with Johnson and public television, as well as his non -stop access to investigative journalism. It was a label that he did not necessarily deny.
“I am an old -fashioned liberal when it comes to being open and interested in other people’s ideas,” he said during a 2004 Radio interview. But Moyers preferred to call himself a “civic journalist” acting independently, outside the institution.
Public television (and his self-financed production company) gave him free to throw out “the conversation of open democracy for all coming,” he said in a 2007 interview with the Associated Press.
“I think my peers on commercial television are talented and dedicated journalists,” he said once, “but they have chosen to work in a stream of corporates that reduce their talent to suit the nature of the American life corporation. And you are not rewarded to tell the difficult truths about America in a profit environment.
From sports to sports writing
Born in Hugo, Oklahoma, on June 5, 1934, Billy Don Moyers was the son of a Disadvantage of Bayrak of the dirt farmers who quickly transferred his family to Marshall, Texas. High school led him to journalism.
“I wanted to play football, but I was very small. But I discovered that writing sports in the school newspaper, the players were always waiting around in the newsroom to see what I wrote,” he recalled.
He worked for Marshall News Messenger at the age of 16. Deciding that Bill Moyers was a more suitable part for a sports writer, he threw “y” from his name.
He graduated from the University of Texas and won a master’s degree from the Southwest Baptist theological seminar. He was ordained and preached part -time in two churches, but later decided that his call to the ministry “was a wrong number”.
His relationship with Johnson began when he was in college; He wrote the then senator offering to work in his re -election campaign in 1954. Johnson was amazed and hired him for a summer job. He was again in Johnson’s employment as a personal assistant in the early 1960s and for two years, he worked in the Corps of Peace, eventually becoming deputy director.
On the day John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Moyers was in Austin helping the presidential journey. He flew back to Washington at Air Force One with the newly sworn President Johnson, for whom he kept various work in the coming years, including the press secretary.
The Moyers Syntus as the press presidential secretary was marked by efforts to improve the worsening relationship between Johnson and the media. But the Vietnam war took its number and Moyers resigned in December 1966.
For his departure from the White House, he later wrote, “We had become a war government, not a reform government and had no creative role for me in those circumstances.”
He admitted that he may have been “very diligent in protecting my policies” and said he regretted criticizing journalists as the winner of the Pulitzer Award Peter Arnett, then a special correspondent with AP, and the safest CBS Morley for their war cover.
A long term on television
In 1967, Moyers became a publisher of Newsday based in Long Island and focused on adding news analysis, investigative parts and living features. Within three years, the suburban daily had won two pulitzers. He left the letter in 1970 after ownership changed. That summer, he traveled 13,000 miles across the country and wrote a better-selling account of his Odyssey: “Listening to America: a traveler rediscovers his place.”
His next venture was on public television, and he gained a critical appreciation for “Bill Moyers Journal”, a series in which interviews went from Gunnar Myrdal, Swedish economist, to poet Maya Angelou. He was a correspondent for “CBS Reports” from 1976 to 1978, returned to PBS for three years, and then he was a senior news analyst for CBS from 1981 to 1986.
When CBS interrupted documentaries, he returned to PBS for much less money.
“If you have a skill you can fold with your tent and go wherever you feel you should go, you can follow the desire of your heart,” he once said.
Then in 1986, he and his wife, Judith Davidson Moyers, became their bosses forming public affairs television, an independent store that has not only produced programs such as 10-day “in search of the Constitution” but also paid for them through their own fundraising efforts.
His projects in the 21st century included “now”, a weekly public affairs program at PBS; A new edition of “Bill Moyers Journal” and a podcast covering racism, voting rights and the rise of Donald Trump, among other subjects.
Moyers married Judith Davidson, a college classmate in 1954, and they raised three children, among them author Suzanne Moyers and author-TV manufacturer, William Cope Moyers. Judith eventually became her husband’s partner, creative associate and president of their production company.
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