Free Republic

Boulder, Colo. Founding a democracy, rather like living in a democracy, can be very tough on friendship. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson began as friends. The tensions and frictions of the early Republic took care of that. Then, after years of silence between them, a mutual friend persuaded them to write to each other. In 1812, they launched into a correspondence that continued until it was ended by their deaths. That ending point was on their minds and drove their correspondence. As Mr. Adams wrote Mr. Jefferson, "You and I ought not to die, before we have explained ourselves to...

Media harp on PBS political controversy but ignore massive government funding of public broadcasting. PBS advocate Bill Moyers is against subsidies – when they go to the wrong people. But the public broadcasting that airs the show he once hosted rides a $7 billion-plus wave of government funding – a fact that media outlets have omitted in recent coverage of budget wrangling. “Favored corporations get their contracts, subsidies and offshore loopholes,” Moyers said in a political rant on “Now,” a weekly newsmagazine, on March 26, 2004. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), has been...

At the recent so-called "media reform" conference funded by George Soros, his friend Bill Moyers delivered a keynote address. Most of it was predictable left-wing rhetoric. But he did make a point we have been making-the American taxpayers should not be forced to spend their money on a public TV show featuring members of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Moyers noted that Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, put up a considerable sum of money, about $5 million, for a new weekly broadcast featuring Paul Gigot and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Moyers...

Political opportunists in its ranks sought a wedge issue to weaken the GOP's coalition of Jews, Catholics and evangelicals and shatter its electoral majority. They passed over obvious headliners and landed on a curious but cunning choice: the environment. Those leading the charge are effective advocates: LBJ alumnus Bill Moyers of PBS fame, members of the National Council of Churches USA and liberal theologians who claim a moral superiority to other people of faith.

The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party became. That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth. Ideologues don't want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right. They embrace a worldview that can't be proved wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system, and when it doesn't, God forbid. "I put it on to remind myself that not...

Bill Moyers, the lamented, demented former host of the PBS program "Now With Bill Moyers," referred to the American-led war in Iraq as doing "to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us." He called American flag pins "a little metallic icon of patriotism" comparable to Mao's Little Red Book being displayed on every Communist Party official's desk in China. This is silly. The metallic icons of patriotism that Mao used to keep the masses in line were considerably longer and sharper, and were usually applied to the back by a fellow "comrade." Moyers denounced Condoleezza Rice for...

***Media Research Center Viewing Alert*** 8:05pm EDT, Friday May 20, 2005 C-SPAN to Air Moyers Rant on Saturday Morning On Saturday morning, at 10am EDT (9am CDT, 8am MDT and 7am PDT), C-SPAN will air the hour-plus address by Bill Moyers last Sunday at the left-wing Free Press' "National Conference for Media Reform" held in St. Louis. His rant, including attacks on a variety of those affiliated with the "right wing," including CPB Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, caused a bit of a stir last week. To read the text of his angry remarks: http://www.freepress.net/press/release.php?id=71 Or: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/16/1329245 But it's worth watching to...

I AM a longtime subscriber who is dismayed at the Globe's unwillingness to call a spade a spade -- or, more to the point, call a liberal a liberal. Liberal print is fine as long as I don't have to support it. The May 15 editorial about PBS never uses the ''L" word to describe Bill Moyers. I believe Moyers is a member of the genuinely crazy left. This same editorial describes as conservative: columnist Cal Thomas, Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Paul Gigot, editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal. Grover Norquist is...

ST. LOUIS - (KRT) - Bill Moyers denounced on Sunday the right wing and top officials at the White House, saying they are trying to silence their critics by controlling the news media. He also took aim at reporters who become little more than willing government "stenographers." And he said the public increasingly is content with just enough news to confirm its own biases. Moyers spoke in St. Louis at a conference on media reform. His reports have appeared on the Public Broadcasting System since the 1970s. He was an aide to President Lyndon Johnson and is a former newspaper...

A New York Times editorial writer phoned to follow up on that paper's recent Page One article that charged I was "aggressively pressing public television" to reflect the political balance and diversity required by law. At one point she expressed concern the "Wall Street Journal Editorial Report" — a public television program launched in part to balance the advocacy journalism of Bill Moyers' "NOW" — would soon dominate airwaves in major markets. I explained there was no chance of that.

The old news: PBS is still a liberal monstrosity transforming the hard-earned dollars of many Bush-loving taxpayers into fire-breathing Bush-loathing programming. The new development: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has plans to get serious about seeking a better balance of political views on PBS. From the sound of a New York Times front-page story May 2, they must have been waving smelling salts in the face of liberal reporters. Kenneth Tomlinson, the "Republican chairman" of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was said to be pressing aggressively to correct "what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias." The Times approach, pretending...

The old news: PBS is still a liberal monstrosity transforming the hard-earned dollars of many Bush-loving taxpayers into fire-breathing Bush-loathing programming. The new development: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has plans to get serious about seeking a better balance of political views on PBS. From the sound of the New York Times front page on May 2, they must have been waving smelling salts in the face of liberal reporters. Kenneth Tomlinson, the "Republican" chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was said to be pressing aggressively to correct "what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias." The Times approach,...

Sick and tired of ordinary hospitals? You owe it to yourself to check out and check into Equality Diversity Hospital, where caring is sharing and weepers are sleepers. Our staff of desiccated professionals—practical nurses, practical surgeons, cooks, caterer's assistants, manicurists, porters, mortars, pathologists, phrenologists, ornithologists, herpetologists, lepidopterists, and a few dendrologists for full flavor—that is, the whole kit and caboodle—Shave all been hired in proportion to their representation in the general population. No hospital in the entire US is as equal as Equality Diversity—or as diverse. Approximately fifty-three percent of ED staff are apparently female (we ask, but they don't...

Our friends at Powerlineblog.com wrote several weeks back about how the unctuous Bill Moyers had slandered Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt by recycling the canard that "Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.’" Watt never said any such thing, and though this urban legend has been knocked down for more than 20 years, as the Moyers article shows it lives on. Moyers had to issue a public apology to Watt, as did...

MEDIA MONSTER KILLER Corporate Media, Coming of the Rapture, and the Culture of Fear: Coffee Talk with Bill Moyers by Nick Welsh Spend five minutes on the phone with Bill Moyers, dubbed by some “the conscience” of American journalism, and it’s abundantly obvious that the man is troubled, and profoundly pissed off; though it’s doubtful someone so imbued with good Southern manners would use such talk. Now 70, Moyers has spent most of the past 55 years hunting the truth behind his craft, a working journalist tracing the twisted paths of power for both newspapers and television. Embodying that rare...

Spend five minutes on the phone with Bill Moyers, dubbed by some “the conscience” of American journalism, and it’s abundantly obvious that the man is troubled, and profoundly pissed off; though it’s doubtful someone so imbued with good Southern manners would use such talk. Now 70, Moyers has spent most of the past 55 years hunting the truth behind his craft, a working journalist tracing the twisted paths of power for both newspapers and television. Embodying that rare combination of graciousness, dignity, and passion, Moyers has been audacious enough to tell “the truth behind the news,” rather than to report...

The New York Times seems highly upset that anyone would question the existence or objectivity of what they call the Public Broadcasting "Service." Last week, the paper put PBS's internal worries on Page One, concerned that pressure from conservatives threatens to send PBS lurching -- horrors! -- to the right. Liberal lobbyists inside and outside PBS, including the Times editorial page, are once again trying to convince the Congress to allow them to create a massive $5 billion endowment so they may achieve "financial independence." When PBS stations go digital, requiring less space on the broadcast spectrum, they want to...

"Slight Liberal Flavor" from Bill Moyers, But Tucker Carlson's an "Ideologue"        A Monday editorial, "Ruffling Big Bird's Feathers," laments "ultraconservative" attacks on public television and displays a distorted view of mainstream politics: "With the cable explosion, public television is no longer the only source of what was once labeled 'educational television,' nor of more serious-minded documentaries, cultural and current-events programming. And as ultraconservatives and bottom liners circle, PBS appears to be too accommodating in response. When conservatives attacked the respected Bill Moyers, labeling him a dangerous liberal, PBS offered Tucker Carlson and Paul Gigot. Whatever slight liberal flavor...

On Dec. 1, Harvard University’s Center for Health and the Global Environment gave its “Global Environmental Citizen Award” to the longtime leftist journalist Bill Moyers. Accepting the award from the actress Meryl Streep — she praised Moyers’s “resourceful, intrepid reportage,” and he praised her “special kind of courage” and declared himself “in the front row of [her] fan club” — Moyers devoted his speech to the dangers that Christian fundamentalists allegedly pose to the environment. “Remember James Watt, President Reagan’s first secretary of the interior?” Moyers said. “My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how...

ONE OF LIBERALS' chief motivations these days is fear of the religious right. Ask people on the left to explain their loathing of President Bush or the Republican party, and the answer often comes around to Jerry Falwell, evangelicals, theocracy, and so on. The left's fear of conservative Christians is fed by a steady stream of news stories. Some are accurate: religious conservatives oppose gay marriage. Some are fanciful: Sponge Bob Square Pants has been accused of being a homosexual. And some are simply false. The left's most recent salvo against the religious right was launched by an obscure online...