The legendary journalist Bill Moyers, a former secretary from the white house of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who became one of the most respected voices on television, died on Thursday. He was 91 years old.
Moyers’ son, William, said his father died at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York after a “long illness”.
His storage journalism career covered the newspapers, including as the publisher of Long Island Newsday and television at CBS and PBS, where he won more than 30 EXPYS, 11 George Foster Pearabody Awards, three George Polks and two Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia University Gold Award par excellence in transmission journalism.
He was also a best -selling author, a youth baptist minister and a Deputy Director of the Peace Corps.
But it was for public television that produced some of the most brain and provocative series of television. In hundreds of hours of PBS programs, he addressed subjects ranging from government corruption to modern dance, from drug addiction to media consolidation, from religion to environmental abuse.
In 1988, Moyers produced “The Secret Government” on the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, and simultaneously published a book with the same name. He then galvanized the viewers with “Joseph Campbell and the power of the myth”, a series of six one -hour interviews with the prominent religious scholar. The book that accompanied her became a bestseller.
His television talks with the poet Robert Bly launched almost a single hand in the 90’s male movement and his 1993 series “Healing and the Mind” had a deep impact on the medical community and medical education.
Moyers was introduced to the television fame in 1995.
(Gently) talk the truth in power
Demonstrating what someone called “a gentle style and poll” in the texas accent he never lost, Moyers was a humanist who investigated the world with a quiet and reasoned perspective, whatever the subject.
From some quarters, he was exploited as a liberal thanks to his links to Johnson and public television, as well as his unrestricted approach to research journalism. It was a label that did not necessarily deny.
“I am a fashion liberal when it comes to being open and I am interested in the ideas of other people,” he said during a 2004 radio interview. But Moyers preferred to say -a “citizen journalist” who worked independently, outside the establishment.
Public television (and his autonomous production company) gave him a free restart to launch “the conversation of democracy open to all sellers,” he said in a 2007 interview with The Associated Press.
“I think my commercial television colleagues are talented and dedicated journalists,” he said again, “but they have chosen to work on a corporate current that cuts their talent to adapt to the corporate nature of American life. And they do not receive you rewards for telling the harsh truths on America in an environment that seeks benefits.”
From sport to sports writing
Born in Hugo, Oklahoma, on June 5, 1934, Billy Don Moyers was the son of a farm truck driver who soon moved his family to Marshall, Texas. Secondary school brought him to journalism.
“I wanted to play football, but I was too small. But I found that writing sports in the school newspaper, players always waited at the kiosk to see what I wrote,” he recalled.
He worked for the Marshall News messenger at the age of 16. Deciding that Bill Moyers was a more suitable line for an athlete, he left the “y” of his name.
He graduated from the University of Texas and received a Master’s Degree in South Baptist Theological Seminary -West. He was ordered and predicted part -time in two churches, but later decided that his call to the ministry “was a wrong number.”
His relationship with Johnson began when he was in college; He wrote the offer of then ingenuity to work in his 1954 re -election campaign. Johnson was impressed and hired for a summer job. He returned to the occupation of Johnson as a personal assistant in the early 1960’s and for two years worked in the body of peace, becoming the Deputy Director.
The day John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Moyers was in Austin with the presidential journey. He returned to Washington in the Air Force one with the newly sworn, President Johnson, for whom he occupied several jobs in the following years, including the Secretary of the Press.
Moyers’ trajectory as Secretary of Presidential Press was marked by the efforts to repair the deterioration of the relationship between Johnson and the media. But the Vietnam War affected and Moyers resigned in December 1966.
Of his departure from the White House, he wrote later: “We had become a war government, not a reform government, and I had no creative role in these circumstances.”
He acknowledged that it may have been “too zealous in my defense of our policies” and said he regretted criticizing journalists such as the winner of the Pulitzer Peter Arnett, then special correspondent with the AP, and the safest Morley of CBS for his war coverage.
A long duration on TV
In 1967, Moyers became publisher of Long Island Newsday and focused on adding news, research pieces and animated features. After three years, the Suburban Daily had won two puliters. He left the role in 1970 after the property changed. That summer, she traveled 13,000 kilometers across the country and wrote a best -selling story of her odyssey: “Listening to America: A traveler reducing his country.”
His next adventure was on public television and won a critical acclamation for “Bill Moyers Journal”, a series in which interviews went from Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist, to the Poet Maya Angelou. He was a correspondent for “CBS Reports” from 1976 to 1978, returned to PBS for three years, and later he was CBS senior news analyst from 1981 to 1986.
When CBS cut the documentaries, he returned to PBS for much less money.
“If you have a skill you can fold with the tent and go wherever you feel you have to go, you can follow the desire of your heart,” he said once.
In 1986, he and his wife, Judith Davidson Moyers, became his own chiefs forming public affairs Television, an independent store that has not only produced programs such as the ten hours “in search of the Constitution”, but also paid them through their own fundraising efforts.
His projects in the 21st century included “Now”, a weekly PBS public affairs program; A new edition of “Bill Moyers Journal” and a podcast that covers racism, voting rights and increased Donald Trump, among other topics.
Moyers married Judith Davidson, a college classmate, in 1954, and raised three children, including the author Suzanne Moyers and the producer of the author-TV William Cope Moyers. Judith finally became the partner of her husband, creative collaborator and president of her production company.
With post -cables
#Bill #Moyers #Press #Secretary #White #House #television #journalist #died #age
Image Source : nypost.com