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.
I’m not clear on what Moyers is saying about a trust fund. I’m concerned that the idea seems analogous to saying we should try to independently fund Medicare or AFDC rather than fight for them to be what they need to be as public services financed by our taxes.
But public broadcasting is just that – public. We have the right to have quality public broadcasting (as opposed to its reality), and the responsibility to fund it through public means.
Am I misreading his intent?
I kind of think he means that public funds earmarked for public media should be placed in a fund Congress can’t mess with or make decisions about. Which is cool in and of itself but I land on your spot: this is part of a general struggle we need to have around government’s responsibilities to people and the concept of government being a “public trust”. I think that’s really a huge part of the struggle and public broadcasting, like many other programs, falls in there.
Amazing, isn’t it? There was a time when, to me anyway, Moyers was “a liberal voice” — great journalist, mind you but a liberal voice only. Now he sounds like a revolutionary leader. And I don’t think he’s changed very much; it’s the political environment. One thing is consistent: his integrity shines.
I hope you’re right, Alfredo. I thought that might be the case, but his use of the phrase “independent of a federal treasury” didn’t seem to jibe with that interpretation.
We haven’t discussed this directly with Moyers, but I would assume he means the kind of independent public broadcasting trust fund many progressives have endorsed– for instance, in this piece Peter Hart and I wrote:
Time to Unplug the CPB
Replace corrupt board with independent trust
https://fair.org/index.php?page=2671
I appreciate the intel, Steve. I have many criticisms of Moyers, Goodman, Gonzalez and “progressive” media in general, but I want those to be based on empirical evidence, not supposition.