4 thoughts on “The Late Bill Moyers”

  1. If there is such a thing as a secular Elmer Gantry I think the moniker would fit, otherwise, the one thing I was always sure of Bill Moyers was little, if any, conviction about anything; religious, moral or otherwise. Of course he could ‘portray’ outrage, whether or not he believed in it. But a mesmerizing speaker? No. More like a Lowell Thomas narrator…

    I wouldn’t ding him on the Joseph Campbell series. I enjoyed that immensely. Would have been better if not produced on the taxpayer’s dime. Same could be said for Ken Burns’ productions (The Civil War, The Vietnam War, Empire of the Air (another one of my favorites), etc.).

    That he subsequently profited from follow-on sales of video cassettes, books and whatever. Well grift is as grift does. A lot of people do that. Should the government have clawed that back due to the fact that they funded some of it? Well maybe, but we’re on slippery slopes there. I’d rather think not.

    Like Dan Rather, I always took Moyer’s political advice with a grain of salt the size of a railroad hopper car. The fact that he was heavily involved in the Johnson Administration wasn’t a plus…

    The Democratic Party has left Moyer’s morality in the dust.
    To them he’d be considered a white supremacist, capitalist stooge.

    1. If he was still active, he’d be one of the people whose funding got cut off by DOGE.
      Without a doubt…

  2. Opposite of what I got out of Campbell…

    This morning I saw a video snippet on Substack of Moyer interviewing Noam Chomsky from sometime around 1988 when both men were in more or less top form. It was from the series “A World Of Ideas”. You can re-watch on YouTube here. Or not.

    Moyer kept poking Chomsky about Moyer’s chosen field (post Johnson admin days) of journalism and how it was ideals driven, but Chomsky wasn’t buying any of it. According to Chomsky everything, even media, is corporate driven. Can’t say that he was wrong. But with Chomsky the unstated assumption is that there ought to be a “better way”. That there is a lack of virtue in the workings of corporations. I suppose his point is that corporations are a-virtuous, in the same sense that it is possible to be amoral (As opposed to immoral. Although one doesn’t preclude the other). I think the fair way to characterize Chomsky is as an observer. If there is a better way Chomsky never describes it. Only to say other forms of economic organization are comparatively worse. One could spend an academic career studying Chomsky only to walk away at the end of all that endeavor with the valid conclusion of “So What?”. Which is what I took away from that video. I haven’t read much of his linguistic works. Hopefully of better virtue. Chomsky whether you agree with his outlook or not has a logical pedagogy. The perfect academic.

    BTW there is what I consider some junk philosophy in the Campbell camp. But I believe I got something of value out of the Power Of Myth series and his exploration of the nuances of the Hero’s Quest.

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