Elizabeth Jensen has a preview (New York Times, 1/8/12) of the new Bill Moyers program coming to public television stations later this month--a show that is not being distributed by PBS. Why not? She reports:

Mr. Moyers said he was unsure why PBS, where he has spent most of his career since 1971, declined the show for its main schedule. Some public television executives, who would not publicly comment on a sensitive issue, said they believed that PBS did not want to realign itself with Mr. Moyers, a longtime target of some conservatives, as it was fighting to keep its federal financing.

Perhaps PBS might consider a new, more accurate slogan: Not Offending Conservatives When We're Fighting for Funding, Which is Always.

In the piece, Moyers seems happy with the situation, saying that  "we don't have to worry about somebody at PBS losing sleep over the fact that David Stockman says the Republicans have lost their minds on taxes."

And Jensen adds:

His return comes as public television executives are debating their path: More Downton Abbey, or local and national news? So far, public affairs programming is losing. PBS canceled Now when Bill Moyers Journal ended; the replacement show Need to Know was recently trimmed from one hour to 30 minutes.

Yet, Mr. Moyers noted, PBS announced an additional version of Antiques Roadshow just a few weeks after the Census Bureau released figures showing the number of people living in poverty had risen to more than 46 million.

"I love Antiques Roadshow," he added. "But it is just symbolic of how we’re not connected viscerally to the state of the American people right now."

Bill Moyers appeared on Democracy Now! this morning (6/8/11) to discuss his new book about his days at PBS, The Conversation Continues.

Interviewed for the  hour by anchors Any Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Moyers said,  "The consensual seduction of the mainstream media by and with the government is one of the most dangerous toxins at work in America today."

He spoke, too, of the lost mission of public broadcasting, and how its reliance on the political whims of Congress for some of its funding prevents it from living up to its potential:

Sometimes self-censorship occurs because you're looking over your shoulder, and you think, well, if I do this story or that story, it will hurt public broadcasting. Public broadcasting has suffered often for my sins, reporting stories the officials don't want reported. And today, only...a very small percentage of funding for NPR and PBS comes from the government. But that accounts for a concentration of pressure and self-censorship. And only when we get a trust fund, only when the public figures out how to support us independently of a federal treasury, will we flourish as an independent medium.

On the Daily Show on June 1, Bill Moyers talked about the types of outsider guests he preferred to interview on his TV show.

As he put it at one point: "The worst hour that I ever put on, was many years ago, with Henry Kissinger....  I vowed after that never to do an hour with any official. None."

Interviewing guests who challenge or question the conventional wisdom or the status quo is exactly what we should be seeing on public television. Two nights before the Moyers interview (5/30/11), Charlie Rose offered a reminder that we've got a long way to go.

He interviewed, for a whole hour, this guy:

Bill Moyers on the Tavis Smiley Show (5/13/11), talking about the elite bias in the media:

Television, including public television, rarely gives a venue to people who have refused to buy into the ruling ideology of Washington. The ruling ideology of Washington is we have two parties, they do their job, they do their job pretty well. The differences between them limit the terms of the debate. But we know that real change comes from outside the consensus. Real change comes from people making history, challenging history, dissenting, protesting, agitating, organizing.

Those voices that challenge the ruling ideology--two parties, the best of all worlds, do a pretty good job--those voices get constantly pushed back to the areas of the stage you can’t see or hear. You got voices like those on your show. You got them on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! and a few other places like that, but not as a steady presence in the public discourse.

Later in the program came this exchange about the mission of public broadcasting:

Smiley: I say this--and this might be politically incorrect to say on PBS--but we are not living up to that charter. We're not living up to it on public television; we're not living up to it on public radio when it comes to a diversity and inclusion of other voices. We're not living up to that. So I wonder whether or not, in some ways, we deserve being pricked a little bit, pushed a little bit, if we're not living up to the charter, but you tell me.

Moyers: I don't think we’re living up to that charter that Lyndon Johnson proclaimed. No, I don't. The conservatives have won to this extent. Too many people in public television and public radio are looking over their shoulders, fearing that the right is after them. We don't really have a left in this country. There's no organized left that comes after journalists the way that the right comes after journalists who offer a different alternative.

This is an old story, Tavis. Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan, his communications director, tried to do it in public broadcasting back in the early '70s when they accused us of being liberal when, in fact, we were just offering an alternative view of reality, something they don’t want.

Then Bob Dole when he was Senate minority leader came after public broadcasting. Newt Gingrich came after public broadcasting and, of course, under the George W. Bush administration, you had a Republican Corporation for Public Broadcasting more responsive to Karl Rove than they were to the stations out here.

So that constant harassment creates a kind of caution and self-censorship on the part of people who just don't want to--you know, we don’t get but about 17 percent of the total budget from the Congress, but that's enough to leave a big hole in what the local stations do if we don't have it.

But it creates almost a Pavlovian response, and I think there is an unintended, but inevitable, censorship that takes place on the part of people who are running the programs, booking the programs, lining up guests, to make sure that we don't give the right wing another opportunity to come in and accuse us of being liberal.

Read FAIR's recent study of public television, or FAIR's response to the news about Jim Lehrer's semi-retirement.

Fox host Bill O'Reilly warned viewers on December 3 about "a disturbing development at the FCC": Commissioner Michael Copps has been criticizing the failure of the media to provide citizens with substantive political information and discussion.

O'Reilly zeroed in on these comments Copps made in a BBC interview (12/1/10):

I think American media has a bad case of substance abuse right now. We are not producing the body of news and information that democracy needs to conduct a civic dialogue. We are not producing as much news as we did five years, 10 years, 15 years ago. We have to reverse that trend or I think we are going to be pretty close to denying our citizens the essential news and information that they need to have in order to make intelligent decisions.

As O'Reilly put it, "The key words from Copps are: 'We have to reverse that trend.'" O'Reilly wondered if this was a government takeover plot: "Are you going to begin calling shots here on the Factor?" Of course, FCC rules govern broadcasting, not cable news--so O'Reilly will remain free to mislead his audience for as long as Rupert Murdoch allows.

But O'Reilly allowed for one exception:

Finally, this broadcast will fight any intrusion on the media by the federal government, unless, of course, they want to put Bill Moyers in jail.

I know, I know--he's joking. But it says something about how O'Reilly's brain works that he'd invent a government intrusion on freedom of the press, and then find it amusing to crack about jailing a television journalist who isn't even on TV anymore.

Trying to explain why Need to Know, the PBS public affairs show that appeared in the Friday night timeslot vacated by Bill Moyers Journal and Now, has gotten such a cool reception from viewers, co-host Allison Stewart seems to blame nostalgia. "Obviously you can't replace Bill Moyers," says Stewart
(Show Tracker, 8/5/10). "That's just a ridiculous notion."

The funny thing is, Bill Moyers was replaced: When he left Now to resume doing Bill Moyers Journal, David Brancaccio took over as host, later joined by Maria Hinojosa. Under their tenure, Now retained its loyal following, because Brancaccio and Hinojosa were pursuing the same kind of independent investigative journalism that Moyers had aspired to--the kind of programming that PBS was created to air because it's unlikely to be produced by commercial networks.

If those same viewers find Need to Know lacking, it's not because Stewart and co-host Jon Meacham aren't Moyers--it's because they don't understand the journalistic values that Moyers represented.

Longtime health insurance company bigwig and former holder of "the ultimate PR job," Wendell Potter recently told PBS' Bill Moyers (Bill Moyers Journal, 7/10/09) how he had been "involved in the campaign by the industry to discredit Michael Moore and his film Sicko," and now sees that "the industry is resorting to the same tactics they've used... back in the early '90s, when they were leading the effort to kill the Clinton plan" for national healthcare reform.

Potter told Moyers that he "knew that 47 million people were uninsured, but I didn't put faces with that number" until he "picked up the local newspaper and I saw that a healthcare expedition was being held a few miles up the road." Seeing "people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care," sparked his defection from the PR machine, and ultimately moved him to appear on Moyers' show to describe the insurance companies' fear of "high-profile cases":

When you have a case like that--a family or a patient goes to the news media and complains about having some coverage denied that a doctor had recommended. In this case, Nataline Sarkisyan's doctors at UCLA had recommended that she have a liver transplant. But when the coverage request was reviewed at Cigna, the decision was made to deny it.

It was around that time, also, that the family had gone to the media, had sought out help from the California Nurses Association and some others to really bring pressure to bear on Cigna. And they were very successful in getting a lot of media attention, and nothing like I had ever seen before....

It got everyone's attention. Everyone was focused on that in the corporate offices.

Unfortunately, the U.S. press' general attention toward the larger story of insurance company evildoing has been neglectful to say the least, as exemplified by the fact that this was Potter's "first extended television interview since leaving the health insurance industry...last year." Encourage journalists to correct at least part of this by signing FAIR's petition to Tell Media: Include Single-Payer in Healthcare Debate.

In a Smirking Chimp piece (5/29/09) averring that "Everyone Should See Torturing Democracy"--the delayed documentary that "recounts how the Bush White House and the Pentagon decided to make coercive detention and abusive interrogation the official U.S. policy" and "also credits the brave few who stood up to those in power"--PBS' Bill Moyers spells out the larger consequences of the fact that "in all the recent debate over torture, many of our Beltway pundits and politicians have twisted themselves into verbal contortions to avoid using the word at all":

Smothering the reality of torture in euphemism of course has a political value, enabling its defenders to diminish the horror and possible illegality. It also gives partisans the opening they need to divert our attention by turning the future of the prison at Guantánamo Bay into a "wedge issue," as noted on the front page of Sunday's New York Times.

According to the Times, "Armed with polling data that show a narrow majority of support for keeping the prison open and deep fear about the detainees, Republicans in Congress started laying plans even before the inauguration to make the debate over Guantánamo Bay a question of local community safety instead of one about national character and principles."

Moyers gives us the upshot: "No political party would dare make torture a cornerstone of its rejuvenation if people really understood what it is. And lest we forget, we're not just talking about waterboarding, itself a trivializing euphemism for drowning." See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "From Water Torture to ‘Waterboarding’: Media Rehabilitate Torture as Aquatic Sport" (5–6/08) by Isabel Macdonald; "Torturing Language: Definitions, Defenses and Dirty Work" (7-8/05) by Jacqueline Bacon.

Leave it to Forbes to get someone from the Hoover Institution to do an "in-depth" feature on "The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media" (1/22/09).

The results are about as bogus as you might imagine, including a number of people who are not only not liberals, but who are actively loathed by the actual left end of the media spectrum--and the feeling is generally mutual: folks like Fred Hiatt, Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, Christopher Hitchens (did their Nation sub lapse in 1998?), Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews and Andrew Sullivan.

Then there are some corporate journalists whose "liberalism" seems entirely resume-based: Kurt Andersen founded Spy and does a culture show on NPR! David Shipley wrote speeches for Bill Clinton and works at the New York Times! Gerald Seib works at the Wall Street Journal but doesn't write for the editorial page! Andersen is the kind of "liberal" who writes about "the Democrats' 'mommy party' M.O. of naivete, mollycoddling, and profligacy," Seib does pieces like "Bipartisanship Could Help Victorious Democrats," while Shipley's Times op-ed page has been the object of repeated complaints from FAIR for its right-slanted choices.

There's a couple of people on the list--Jon Stewart and Oprah Winfrey--who are indeed influential liberals who are "in U.S. media"...but if by "media" they don't mean journalism, why not include Steven Spielberg or Bruce Springsteen?  They're "in U.S. media" too.

Then there's the bloggers, who largely define themselves as not being part of the "MSM": Arianna Huffington, Kevin Drum, Glenn Greenwald, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Joshua Micah Marshall.

That leaves six people on the list of 25 who actually are liberal journalists with a regular platform in traditional U.S. media: the New Yorker's Hendrick Hertzberg; the Atlantic's James Fallows; Michael Pollan, a freelance writer for the New York Times; Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman; MSNBC's Rachel Maddow; and PBS's Bill Moyers. What does this say about the myth of the liberal media? Maybe the Hoover Institution can study that.

What would a real list of the most important progressive media figures look like? Feel free to leave suggestions in comments.