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WASHINGTON - No TV journalist has reported more aggressively on the influence of money in American politics than Bill Moyers, the anchor of eight hours of hard-hitting, award-winning documentaries on the topic.
But Moyers has failed to tell one important story about the power of money in public affairs: his own.
Moyers, 65, a respected figure in broadcast journalism, also is the $200,000-a-year president of a foundation that has pumped more than $15 million into the crusade to change America's campaign-finance laws.
His triple roles as journalist, advocate and financier have made Moyers one of the nation's most influential champions of tighter restrictions on campaign contributions. In fact, as the Senate began debate on campaign finance this week, Moyers is using his control over money and media to influence public policy in ways that would be the envy of the special interests he deplores.
His overlapping roles, experts in media ethics say, also pose serious conflicts of interest that Moyers has never disclosed to PBS viewers. In addition to helping finance the campaign for tougher campaign-finance laws, The Florence & John Schumann Foundation, of which Moyers is president, has long subsidized coverage of money's role in politics on public radio and public television.
Taboo in many newsrooms
Many news organizations prohibit their journalists from advocating or having any financial interest in issues they cover because such mixed allegiances would raise questions about the independence of their reporting.
But Moyers, who interrupted his journalism career to work as a top aide to President Lyndon Johnson, said he sees no need to separate his roles as journalist and activist.
"I practice journalism as a form of public education, and I practice grant-making as a form of public education," says Moyers. "I think a journalist is a citizen, and you have to be honest with yourself about what you care about as a citizen, as well as what you do as a journalist."
Moyers himself has not received a Schumann grant since he took over the New Jersey-based foundation in 1990. But his broadcasts have showcased the views of watchdog organizations that track money and politics without revealing that the same groups have received sizable Schumann foundation grants.
Consider Moyers' last money-and-politics expose, a one-hour PBS special titled "Free Speech For Sale," which aired in June and charged that corporate money stifles political debate.
The broadcast opened with the views of several experts in the field but never revealed that their organizations have received a total of $2.6 million from The Schumann Foundation in the past five years. That was disclosed in the foundation's IRS submissions.
All three championed Schumann's point of view.
"I don't consider democracy to be really functioning when one side's got a loudspeaker and the other side is being forced to whisper," said Bert Neuborne, legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice in New York.
Also featured in the segment: Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, and Bob Hall, research director of Democracy South in Chapel Hill, N.C.
"Washington's Other Scandal," Moyers' most recent PBS Frontline broadcast on alleged Democratic and Republican fund-raising excesses, features a similar lack of disclosure. On the program, Moyers is ardent - "The arms race in campaign money is undermining the very soul of our democracy," he says at one point - and at the hour's end viewers are referred to Web sites of the "best" reform groups. Most, it turns out, are Schumann grantees.
It's "idiotic" to think that prominent journalists won't have conflicts of interest, said Lee Wilkins, a professor of media ethics at the University of Missouri, and strong documentaries generally have strong points of view.
Disclosure is called key
"But disclosure of the conflicts is really crucial," Wilkins said, so if Moyers wants to continue funding the drive to campaign-finance-reform campaign, he might consider leaving the reporting to others.
Wilkins worries, as does Bob Steele, an ethics specialist at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla., that Moyers' undisclosed roles will lead critics to conclude that public broadcasting has what Steele calls "a point of view, a bias, an agenda" when it comes to money and politics.
Moyers' response
In an interview, Moyers said he never mentioned his Schumann role in a PBS broadcast because "I was doing money and politics long before I came to the Schumann Foundation" and "no Schumann money has gone into any of my journalism since then." He said he took no part in the Web site's design, and featured Schumann grantees in his free-speech documentary because they were experts, not because they were his grantees.
Thomas Epstein, PBS's vice president for communications, said he sees no conflict of interest that needs disclosure.
Frontline's executive producer, David Fanning, didn't mention Moyers' foundation's role in their last collaboration but thinks perhaps he should in the next. It's an expose titled "Justice For Sale" on the alleged pitfalls of contributions to judicial elections.
Said Fanning: "We would certainly want to express any journalist's involvement in the subject which they were covering."
More about foundation
The Schumann Foundation is governed by a six-member board, of which Moyers is president. It had assets of $90.2 million at the end of 1998 from a trust established by General Motors and IBM heirs.
Its investment in the campaign-finance-reform movement, experts say, is about a third of total philanthropic giving on the issue. Early grants helped found three of Washington's most-quoted political reform groups: the Center for Responsive Politics, the Center for Public Integrity and Public Campaign.
In addition, Schumann has sponsored training programs in money-and-politics reporting for journalists. Several Knight Ridder journalists, including this reporter, have attended at Schumann's expense.
Other Schumann grants have bankrolled media coverage - none of it by Moyers himself - by PBS's "Frontline," "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," National Public Radio, Monitor Radio and Public Radio International. Many of these news organizations routinely disclose contributions, including Schumann's, and identify the reporting topics they help finance.
To help raise public awareness of money and politics, at least on National Public Radio, the Schumann Foundation until last month helped fund two award-winning money and politics reporters, Peter Overby and Steven Rosenfeld. Schumann's grants - $468,000 over five years - certainly increased the airtime NPR devoted to money and politics, said managing editor Bruce Drake. But the money didn't distort NPR's agenda, Drake added, because he wanted to do even more reporting in the field than Schumann's money permitted.
Asked whether Bill Moyers' son, John, who until February served as Schumann's $75,000-a-year executive director, had proposed stories or reacted to them, Drake responded: "I'm not going to go further than saying that John was not shy about calling and discussing the beat."
He added: "We take every possible step to make sure that when we accept money from foundations, we use it to do the kind of reporting we think we should be doing."
The younger Moyers now heads the Florence Fund of Washington, a $5 million Schumann spin-off that backs reform groups with paid media ads and an on-line journal.
Bill Moyers sees no irony in spending more money to shape public policy than many special interests do. The point, he said, is to reduce money's overweening power, expand political participation and "level the playing field."
In particular, here is the post which prompted my search:
There's a really nasty attack ad in the NY Times Op-Ed page today with the title: "The Queen of Hate Radio: Dr. Laura's Anti-Gay Crusade." The outfit that placed the ad, the full text of which I don't have the energy or desire to type in here, is called "TomPaine.com." In tiny type at the bottom it says: "(c)2000 The Florence Fund, 1636 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20009."Also during my search, I discovered that Justin Raimondo has connected the Florence Foundation to the smear attacks against Patrick J. Buchanan:As I recall, TomPaine.com has placed other hateful ads in the past few months, though I'm afraid I don't recall the details. I think they were connected with the McCain attack on Bush, but I'm not sure of that.
Does anyone know what The Florence Fund is, and who funded it? 5 Posted on 03/08/2000 15:44:06 PST by Cicero
This entire company of mediocre academics and subsidized publicists does a really pathetic job, for all their sound and fury – and all their fat funding from "The Florence Fund," whose other charitable tax-exempt activities include support for National Public Radio and The American Prospect, the chief theoretical journal of Clintonized liberalism. Do you have any idea how much a quarter page ad in the New York Times costs? Last time I checked, it was over $70,000 – a nice chunk of cash even in these high-flying times. The joke is that, for the money, this hatchet job is strictly third and even fourth-rate. If I were The Florence Fund, I would demand a refund. ALL THAT MONEY!
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very interesting. Thanks for the post.
bump.
Once again Liberals show what hypocracy is all about. Other peoples money being used to shape public opinion is evil. But their money being used to shape public opinion is good. How they live with such dishonesty is beyond me
This was a good read. Thanks for the post!
Always disliked Moyers, he always tells only half of the story...ususally the liberal half.
Moyers is that typical radical-chic self-congratulatory fat cat. I guess he pulls his sorrowful, southern-gentleman face all the way to the bank.
The 503-C's have spawned an incredible pile of bogus charites in the past few years.
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