The Bill Moyers Scandal on PBS |

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-Ashleigh Crowther October 2, 2007

Journalist Bill Moyers stirred controversy on November 8, 2002 during his Friday night PBS show Now with Bill Moyers when he complained about the GOP Congressional Elections sweep, which had happened 3 days earlier. He attacked the Republican party, saying that it would "force pregnant women to give up control over their own lives," use "taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich" and give "corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment." He went even further, blasting the GOP’s Christian support base: "If you like God in government," he said, "get ready for the Rapture. These folks don’t even mind you referring to the GOP as the party of God."

Predictably, the comments prompted attack from conservatives, among them Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.

At the next meeting of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) Board (the government agency in charge of funding public broadcasting), objectivity in programming became a hot-button issue. Members voted unanimously to uphold PBS’ commitment to objectivity. According to the November 19 resolution, "It is especially important in these extraordinary times for public broadcasting to provide information to the public about issues of national import in a manner that represents multiple points of view... The Public Broadcasting Act recognizes the need to treat subjects of a controversial nature in a fair and balanced way."

The CPB had already chosen not to fund Now when the show was first pitched in 2001. However, PBS had decided to go ahead with the program, with funding from PBS, Mutual of American Life Insurance Co., and various foundations.The first episode of NOW with Bill Moyers had aired January 18, 2002.

In Broadcasting, Cable, the Internet and Beyond, Joseph Dominick establishes that the CPB had been established in 1967 by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. The main purpose of the CPB was to appropriate funding to public programming and station development. In 1969, the CPB had created PBS to manage network interconnections between stations.

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 demands, among other things, that public broadcasts maintain objectivity by allowing the public to send comments to Board members, by requiring public broadcast stations to regularly review their programming for objectivity, and by demanding that stations dissemate information publicly about their efforts to remain objective. Therefore, the accusation that Bill Moyers was a left-wing pundit was especially troubling to PBS and the CPB. It implied that PBS' programming was violating the law and not fulfilling its responsibiliy of informing the public in an objective, informational manner.

CPB Board Chairman Ken Tomlinson- a Republican- called for an investigation of bias in PBS programming. However, the CPB’s independent inspector general Kenneth Konz soon found himself investigating Tomlinson’s investigation.Tomlinson was charged with breaking the Public Broadcasting Act by commissioning a political content review and allowing the director of the White House Office of Global Communications to write guidelines for the reviewers. In November 2005, Tomlinson resigned from the CPB after Konz found that he had used controversial outside “bias ratings.”

However, the wheels at PBS had already been set in motion. In response to conservative criticism, in 2003 PBS began scrambling to create conservative shows to counter Moyers’ program. On September 17, 2004 The Journal Editorial Report debuted on PBS, featuring writers and editors from the Wall Street Journal; however, the show was canceled by December 2005.Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered debuted on June 18, 2004, featuring right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson, who had made his name on CNN’s Crossfire. The show failed within a year.

On December 17, 2004 Bill Moyers appeared for the last time on NOW with Bill Moyers. One of his last pieces, titled "A Matter of Opinion," focused on conservative talk show hosts' bullying of public airwaves. The Washington Post's Tom Shales lamented that he was "one of the few liberal voices left in broadcasting." Moyers was replaced by David Brancaccio and the program was renamed NOW with David Brancaccio.

Bibliography of offline sources:

Dominick, Joseph R. Broadcasting, Cable, the Internet and Beyond. New York: McGraw Hill, 2004.