Monday, May 16, 2005
Moyers Defends PBS, Takes Aim at `Radical Right'
Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch 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.
Moyers said those in power - government officials and their allies in the media - mean to stay there by punishing journalists "who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable."
Moyers described those officials as "obsessed with control" of the media. He said they are using the government "to threaten and intimidate."
Moyers answered for the first time recent charges that public television in general and he in particular have become too liberal.
Those charges are from Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and, in effect, Moyers' boss at the network.
Tomlinson, a Republican, paid an outside consultant $10,000 to keep track of the political leanings of guests on Moyers' show, "Now." Moyers left the show last year but is back on public television as host of the series "Wide Angle."
Ernest Wilson III serves with Tomlinson on the board that oversees public broadcasting. He said PBS outranks the Fox News Channel, CNN and all the broadcast news networks in a survey that asked whom the public trusts.
"We are, by far, the most `fair and balanced,'" he said, a reference to the motto of Fox News. MUCH MORE
# posted by ATN @ 12:00 AM 
