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'Mr. Rogers' of news gets edgy - "Trying to get truth behind the news"
Christian Science Monitor ^ | May 2, 2003 | Janet Saidi

Posted on 05/02/2003 1:13:39 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife

Bill Moyers combines fireside chat style with penchant for in-depth news.

At a time when TV news programs feature war in real time and talk shows morph into shouting matches, there is one program going against the grain - with lengthy interviews, philosophical insights, and tireless coverage of domestic issues.

"Now With Bill Moyers," which airs Friday nights, debuted in January last year in answer to what PBS felt was a need for responsive, post-9/11 news programming.

Mr. Moyers, who aired a series of special reports after the Sept. 11 attacks, delayed a planned retirement in order to host the weekly newsmagazine.

Viewers familiar with Moyers's special reports and documentaries, such as the well-known "Power of Myth" series with Joseph Campbell, or the recent "Becoming American: The Chinese Experience," probably aren't surprised to find Moyers's philosophically framed questions and fireside-chat style on "Now."

What may set "Now" apart from previous Moyers programming is a tone of urgency that offers not only hard-driven, alternative news, but decidedly cutting-edge content.

"We're trying to get the truth behind the news," says Moyers, who also credits his production staff, who are half his age, for the edgy tone. "An official person speaks, and we as journalists often act as stenographers for it ... when all too often what's actually happening behind; the words is the real story. Someone once said that news is what's hidden, everything else is advertising."

That may sound a little, well, radical for a man in a Mr. Rogers sweater. In fact, while Moyers still comes across as empathetic and engaged in interviews, his on-air style is more probing and direct: "I've become impatient with the superfluous," Moyers admits.

'Spinach' TV

The "Now" method of letting people finish their thought doesn't always thrive in a sound-bite landscape. The future of the respected in-depth program "Nightline" was called into question last year. At the time, "Nightline" was drawing more than 4 million viewers - almost double the 2.3 million who tune in each week for "Now."

Bob Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, compares the investigative format of "Now" to "eating your spinach," admitting that he has not watched the program enough to form an opinion.

Speaking generally, "seriousness and sobriety don't make for good television," Mr. Lichter explains. "The most popular talkers are loud and more sure of themselves.... There needs to be a place for serious discussion of real issues on television, and PBS is about the only place to have it - except for Fox, of course," he quips.

Nor does this seem to be the best time to be a news commentator with views to the left of Bill O'Reilly. Liberal analysis programs hosted by Phil Donahue and Jeff Greenfield were canceled in the past year - leaving Moyers one of the few liberal commentators on TV.

The more popular debate formula used by news-talk programs involves what Lichter refers to as "rock 'em sock 'em" - pitting people who don't agree against one another. Think "The O'Reilly Factor" and "The McLaughlin Group" - or HBO's "Real Time" with Bill Maher.

The "he said, she said" debate styles that are the order of the day are ineffective, says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications, who has been a guest on "Now."

"Moyers presents a framework through which you see something from an ideologically coherent perspective," says Ms. Jamieson, coauthor of "The Press Effect," "and if you don't like what you're seeing, there are places you can go to listen to the other side.... What makes 'Now' important is that it provides a regular menu of the unexpected, presented in a complex fashion by a good interviewer."

As for Lichter's "spinach," Jamieson adds, "There are people who like spinach - and you can develop a taste for it."

An average interview on "Now" runs a lengthy 16 minutes, and some have been stretched to 20. "Now" executive producer John Siceloff admits that the program makes larger demands of its viewers, but believes it's a matter of adjusting to the high level of discussion: "We've grown an audience that delights in that complexity and that insight because they don't get it anywhere else."

Funded by taxpayers

Not everyone watching "Now" is delighting in its complexity. The conservative Media Research Center awarded Moyers with the quote of the year at their annual "dishonor" awards in March, for a November statement criticizing the Bush administration: "... If you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture."

Conservatives' main objection is that Moyers delivers liberal commentary on PBS - publicly funded television. "Even if he's marshaling facts," says Media Research's Tim Graham, "he's marshaling facts at the service of his agenda ... and he's got this enormous tax-payer-funded megaphone."

"Now" - which has had a number of conservative guests - sees its programming not as liberal but as alternative. "We don't say, 'How can we beat up on Bush this week?' " says Mr. Siceloff. "We think it is indeed the duty of good journalists to say, 'OK, let's understand this issue in a deep way.'... Sometimes that will be in praise of what's going on and sometimes in criticism - we do think that just because Bush said it, doesn't make it right."

In addition to stints at Newsday and the CBS evening news, Moyers's early career included working for Lyndon Johnson from 1963-1967, with two years as White House press secretary. Moyers says that what he learned in those early years has helped to shape his interests as a journalist. Of his time in the White House during the Vietnam War, Moyers remembers: "Our credibility was so bad that we couldn't believe our own leaks, and I decided right then that I should've been on the other side."

Moyers feels the pressure of challenging the official line in a politically charged post-9/11 atmosphere. "It's a time when exercising your normal civil liberties brings an abnormal and excessive response to them," Moyers says.

In this atmosphere, he's felt a degree of personal attack, which - though he is considering retiring after 2003 - only seems to add fuel to his fire.

"Unless you're prepared to take hit after unfair hit accusing you of bias and even of having an opinion," he explains, "you have to love it. And I do."


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Government; Miscellaneous; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: advocates; bias; fox; mediam; moyers; mrc; now; pbs
Conservatives' main objection is that Moyers delivers liberal commentary on PBS - publicly funded television. "Even if he's marshaling facts," says Media Research's Tim Graham, "he's marshaling facts at the service of his agenda ... and he's got this enormous tax-payer-funded megaphone."
1 posted on 05/02/2003 1:13:39 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: JohnHuang2
Bump!
2 posted on 05/02/2003 1:17:26 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Just because Moyers said it does not make it right


Deep

Deeper
3 posted on 05/02/2003 1:18:30 AM PDT by woofie
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To: woofie
Christian Science Monitor (April 17, 2003) About CNN: Hold your fire - By Dante Chinni [Full Text] WASHINGTON - Journalists like to tell stories. Besides a dislike for math, it's probably what draws most reporters get into the profession in the first place. And when journalists are away from work and among others of their own ilk, they still tell stories. Things they've seen. Things they've done. Things they didn't put into their copy. This is what journalists do.

This is also, in a sense, what Eason Jordan did last Friday in a now famous/infamous opinion piece he wrote for The New York Times. In the column, Mr. Jordan, the chief news executive for CNN, revealed several stories about atrocities perpetrated by Saddam Hussein that the news network had, but didn't report, because, he said in the piece, "doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those of our Baghdad staff."

For the past week, Jordan has been blasted by members of the media, and especially CNN's competitor Fox News, for not revealing this information earlier. The critics argue that CNN's failure to report these acts - which included the beating of a cameraman, death threats (some which were later carried out), and other tortures - basically amounted to an abdication of the network's mission to report the news.

Before people start burning little CNN logos in effigy, however, a brief word about how journalism really works.

As professions go, journalism involves one of the more complicated games around. Every story a reporter covers creates a notebook full of material, and not all of it makes it into print or broadcast. Some doesn't make the final draft because of space. Sometimes, however, it stays in the notebook because of a judgment call or because a source has said the information was "off the record."

Reporters make these calls all the time. Often people say things to a reporter they'd never reveal to a complete stranger. Say, for instance, that you talk to a journalist about your boss, and in the process you reveal that you believe your boss is insane. You list evidence that he is a horrible man who regularly threatens his staff with pay cuts, firings, or character assassination for the most innocuous reasons. Then afterward, you realize you might have said too much.

In cases like these, reporters have to weigh the value of the information against the damage it could do. If the reporter puts this information into his story, he is essentially guaranteeing your dismissal.

Jordan, of course, was faced with much higher stakes: the lives of his associates and sources. And one can easily see the argument for not running with information that will lead to deaths. At the very least, it's irresponsible; at most it makes the journalist an accomplice to murder.

Further, as Jordan points out, the world was scarcely in need of more evidence that Hussein was a reprehensible human being. The public record was already full of stories of him gassing and torturing his own people.

Jordan's piece does raise some interesting questions, such as why he didn't quietly warn two of Hussein's sons-in-law that Hussein's oldest son, Uday, planned to assassinate them. They were killed in Baghdad a few months after Jordan got the tip.

But there is a bigger question as well. The reason reporters allow things to occasionally be said "off the record" is that even if they can't use that specific information in their stories, the reportage informs their thinking in a larger sense. If a reporter hears a politician make an off-color remark at an "off the record" session, he may not be able to put it into his story, but it certainly affects his view of the man. And just because a reporter can't use that bit of information in the story, he can look for other ways to report it - other things the politician did or said on the same topic.

The question in Jordan's case then is not whether CNN should have withheld information to save lives, but rather whether their reporting adequately explained that picture of Iraq to the public during the past 12 years. That's probably only a question CNN itself or a severely sleep-deprived news junkie can answer.

Another question though - and one that is more difficult to answer - is why one would choose to make all this information public now. There is certainly no shortage of reporting on the atrocities in Iraq under Hussein. There will likely only be more reports in the weeks and months ahead. [End]

4 posted on 05/02/2003 1:31:26 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Some interviews are sixteen minutes, some even stretch to twenty? The horror!

Really makes me miss Firing Line, where most interviews were an hour and an occasional one (Malcolm Muggeridge, I seem to recall) went two. Yet absolutely riveting.

I seem to remember Mortimer Adler getting a little testy with Moyers' slow wits at times, but never, of course, with Buckley. And Adler was testy, generally.

5 posted on 05/02/2003 1:32:35 AM PDT by lambo
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To: lambo
And speaking of the similarities between Moyers and Mr. Rogers, didn't they both start out as ministers in lukewarm, mainstream Protestant denominations?
6 posted on 05/02/2003 1:35:03 AM PDT by lambo
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To: lambo
Bump!

The best in-depth segments are on Brit Hume's Special Edition program on Fox News. He'll delve into a subject/topic with a well informed guest and when the interview is over, you actually are move informed - and it isn't a rah-rah for the Right segment either.

7 posted on 05/02/2003 1:41:00 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: lambo
I think they're firmly in the socialist camp: National Religious Partnership for the Environment
8 posted on 05/02/2003 1:47:20 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
You're right. (It's Special Report, by the way.) Those segments that run approximately the second quarter of the hour are very good.

Still, there's nothing like Firing Line on anymore.

9 posted on 05/02/2003 1:48:54 AM PDT by lambo
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
St. Gaia strikes again.

I've got to get to bed. Good post, I hope it's still here in the morning.
10 posted on 05/02/2003 1:51:02 AM PDT by lambo
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To: lambo
Bump! for Special Edition
11 posted on 05/02/2003 1:58:44 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: All
Bump!
12 posted on 05/02/2003 3:48:29 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Moyers feels the pressure of challenging the official line in a politically charged post-9/11 atmosphere. "It's a time when exercising your normal civil liberties brings an abnormal and excessive response to them," Moyers says.

I'm indebted to Moyers for eductaing me on the scope of my "civil liberties." Now, I want my own taxpayer-funded PBS show, to air all of my opinions, even the stupid ones. When do I start?

13 posted on 05/02/2003 5:52:14 AM PDT by Cincinatus (Omnia relinquit servare Republicam)
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To: Cincinatus
If I had my way, today!
14 posted on 05/02/2003 8:42:40 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
I'll see if I can get you appointed to the PBS board! :^D
15 posted on 05/02/2003 8:44:34 AM PDT by Cincinatus (Omnia relinquit servare Republicam)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
He got sober enought to drive to the studio?
16 posted on 05/02/2003 10:52:27 AM PDT by razorback-bert
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To: razorback-bert
Oh my!
17 posted on 05/02/2003 10:54:28 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus
I don't think so.
18 posted on 05/02/2003 10:54:47 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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