My stomach has been uneasy today thinking about the passing of Bill Moyers. Having lived to age 91, he left a large impact. There was nothing wasted in his life. But at one point in my life, he was very generous to me, and we kept in some contact. Moreover, he was one of our last journalists who was concerned with examining one’s own moral conscience. I’ve already felt that passing from our public discourse. It seems somehow symbolized by the passing of Mr. Moyers.
Most of the reports of his passing say he graduated from the University of Texas. That’s only half true. His first two years as an undergraduate he studied in Denton at North Texas State University, what is now the University of North Texas. But when then-Senator Lyndon Johnson hired him as an intern, he moved to Austin and finished there.
When I was in graduate school, studying journalism at still-NTSU, one of my favorite professors had been Mr. Moyers’s favorite college professor. Dr. Jim Rogers had first mentored the young Bill Moyers and also introduced him to another student, Judith Davidson, who would become his wife.
I had been chosen as the first Mayborn Scholar at then-NTSU (the journalism department has since become the Mayborn School of Journalism), and the department wanted to make a good impression on the Mayborn Foundation. I had an ambitious idea for a graduate thesis (which, I think, still holds up). Here is the summary:
“This study seeks to show that a tradition exists of personal journalists who, more than supporting a partisan position, have moral concern and desire reconciliation. Between the First World War and the Hutchins Commission report of 1947, Walter Lippmann and other media critics theorized that journalistic objectivity is impossible, but recognized journalists' responsibility to interpret events to their publics. In the 1930s these new theories coincided with historical events to encourage journalists' personal involvement with their subjects. The work of the best personal journalists, for example, George Orwell and James Agee, resulted from moral concern. This tradition is furthered today in the journalism of Bill Moyers.”
It was Dr. Rogers’s idea to connect me with Mr. Moyers to bring the study forward. Mr. Moyers and I first wrote back and forth and later had a lunch and a dinner and other conversations. (After I finished the thesis, I made sure to send a copy, along with a profuse thank you letter, to Mr. Moyers, as well as to Mrs. Mayborn.)
My basic argument was, in the short version, that the best journalistic writers, more than being driven by ego, have an understanding of a fallen human nature and their own moral culpability in the events around them. That gives them more humility and greater insight and empathy. You can see some of that self-examination in a book Mr. Moyers wrote after time as a press secretary for then-President Johnson. In a 1971 book, Listening to America: A Traveler Rediscovers His Country, I think Mr. Moyers wasn’t just reconnecting with the regular folks of the country but also examining how he been seduced by ego and the battles of partisan politics.
Later, as a broadcaster, Mr. Moyers looked with Joseph Campbell at the journey of the hero, he examined the harmful effect of our meddling in Central America, he looked at the book of Genesis. (Mr. Moyers was a seminary graduate, too.) The series I followed most closely was his “World of Ideas.” Between 1988 and 1990, Mr. Moyers put together a series of half-hour programs with some of our greatest minds. Elaine Pagels, Toni Morrison, Ernie Cortes, Jonas Salk, Louise Elrich, Barbara Tuchman, and so on. I don’t think that level of discussion has since been reached, at least in U.S. broadcast television.
Today I looked back at my graduate thesis and the chapter devoted to Mr. Moyers’s work and thinking. I wrote then that in summing up “World of Ideas,” Moyers said society needs to recover “a sense of public and private morality.” Moyers said on that last program, “It's the medium in which citizens like you and me discuss commonplace problems and decide together what to do about them.” Moyers continued, “When words become inaccurate and deceptive, they poison our comprehension, we distort the truth until we’re no longer in touch with reality. That way, it seems, lies ruin.” (Words for today, right?)
On a side note to journalism instructors, when I taught writing classes, I would require students to put together a series of questions they would use for an interview. For some, the thought of preparation beforehand was foreign. Maybe they thought they could just wing it. (I also told them that if they interview a writer, read at least one of that person’s books.) We would use some of Mr. Moyers’s interview questions as examples of a well-read, interested interviewer.
If anyone is interested, you can find my thesis online through UNT:
Philosophy and Practice of Personal Journalism with Moral Concern in the Twentieth Century
https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500280/
Thank you very much Mr. Moyers for your example and work.