Bill Moyers: the journalist who was the face of PBS

"In a profit-seeking environment," Bill Moyers said, "you do not get rewarded for telling the hard truths about America."

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By The Week US

published 15 July 2025

Bill Moyers was a legend in public broadcasting, known for deep dives into scandals like Watergate and the Iran-Contra affair. He'd always been idealistic: He started out in politics, working in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, where he helped create and run the Peace Corps and found the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. When he moved to journalism, his primary mission was still public service. Soft-spoken and cerebral, Moyers specialized in long-form documentaries and interviews delving into knotty issues such as inequality, race, crime, and government corruption. He did stints at CBS and NBC but spent most of his career at PBS, free from what he called the corrupting constraints of corporate media. "In a profit-seeking environment," he said, "you do not get rewarded for telling the hard truths about America."

Billy Don Moyers grew up in Marshall, Texas, where his father was a day laborer, said The Washington Post. A standout student "who pushed himself so hard" he got ulcers, he studied journalism at North Texas State College, then attended seminary and was ordained as a Baptist minister at age 20. While in college, Moyers took a summer job on the Senate campaign of fellow Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, and soon left the ministry to work for him. When Johnson rose to the presidency in 1963, "Moyers ascended as well," said the Los Angeles Times. Dubbed "LBJ's young man in charge of everything" by Time, he was a key policy aide, supervising Great Society legislation and serving as press secretary. But as he grew "disenchanted with the escalation of the Vietnam War," he split with Johnson, and he left the administration in 1967.

Moyers worked as publisher of Newsday for a few years until he clashed with the conservative owner, said The New York Times. He launched his own weekly public affairs program, Bill Moyers Journal, at PBS in 1972. In the decades that followed, he "applied his earnest, deferential style to interviews with poets, philosophers, and educators, often on the subject of values and ideas." He racked up more than 30 Emmy Awards, including for the Frontline series Two American Families. In later years, he warned starkly of the growing influence of billionaires on American politics. "We are so close to losing our democracy to the mercenary class," he said in 2013. "The predators in Washington are only this far from monopoly control over government. They have bought the political system lock, stock, and pork barrel."