Journalist Bill Moyers Wishes TV Could Be an “Instrument of Illumination”

He Opts for PBS where his much smaller audiences treasure “Bill Moyers Journal,” with his thoughtful, talk-able fare.

The Washington Star, January 31, 1980: NEW YORK … Bill Moyers was riding in the subway one day when he was approached by “a shabbily-dressed older black man” he at first thought might be a panhandler. “Mr. Moyers,” the man said, “I just wanted to tell you that last Saturday night a group of us were at the house drinking beer. We turned on television and there was your program on Mortimer Adler. We watched it all and sat up until two in the morning and talked about it.”

“That is communication,” says Moyers, awe and some pride in his voice. The program was a TV repeat of a “Bill Moyers’ Journal” conversation with philosopher Mortimer Adler whose book, “Aristotle for Everybody,” was, Moyers says, “dead in the water at the time.” In the six weeks after the show first aired, PBS received 12,000 requests for transcripts of the program and Adler’s book has since gone through five more printings.

More proof, Moyers feels, of television’s potential for being an instrument of illumination. “The dilemma of the mass medium is that it makes no discrimination. It assumes that everybody — at the same time and in the same way — wants their leisure time to be spent passively. The networks ignore that smaller, more engaged part of the citizenry who want to see that the life of the mind and the spirit is being attended.”

Public broadcasting seems to be the place for these smaller, more engaged audiences, the people who respond so vigorously to “Bill Moyers’ Journal.” Yet, as he begins his second season since his return to public television, Bill Moyers is talking about leaving. He’s in his book-crowded office at WNET-TV’s headquarters in the old Hudson Hotel here, the same office you’ll see in the premiere show tonight, “Our Times,” on WETA-26 at 8. His theme: an evaluation of the 70s, “the decade when I turned 40, my children became teenagers, and when I finally realized that my wife’s potential was every bit as important as mine.”

Because he is working journalist as well as a commentator, Moyers is poised for a few hours between Washington and Mexico, where he is taping future programs. “Bill Moyers’ Journal” is a relatively — by PBS standards — expensive traveling show.

“I’m on the precipice,” he says, looking pained. “This is probably the last year I can be on PBS. Budgetary reasons,” he explains. Last year he did 26 half-hour shows at between $76,000 and $84,000 apiece. This year, he says, he’s doing 24 one-hour shows with 11 percent less money. “For the same money,” he says, drily, “they can get Dick Cavett in a studio.”

Bill Moyers, probably the most interesting, literate and learned journalist on television — commercial or PBS — is between the devil and the deep blue sea. He left his job as chief correspondent for the irregularly scheduled “CBS Reports” two years ago when the network was planning to change the public affairs program to a magazine format, also irregularly scheduled.

“I pleaded for a half-hour-a-week program on a single subject, engagingly reported in the same way Ed Murrow’s ‘See It Now’ was. I said to the brass at CBS, give us three years.” That’s what he figured it would take to “1. Create enormous prestige. 2. To create sizeable audience. And 3. Make money.” No takers. “They wanted me to be an anchor, or an Eric Severaid,” he says, ruefully.

When he enumerates — as he does frequently through a long interview — he ticks off his points on his fingers. It is about the only time he slows down long enough for a reporter to scribble his every word. “I speak fast for a Southerner,” he grins, a little slyly.

Born in Oklahoma and raised in Texas, Moyers still has the soft, regional accent which is only one of the elements that makes him distinctive on a medium that has elevated monotony to a science.

Moyers’ is a many-layered experience, a mix of theology (he has a divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary), politics (he was President Lyndon Johnson’s special assistant and press secretary), people (he and Sargent Shriver organized the Peace Corps, of which President John Kennedy made him deputy director), and journalism. His early experience included radio and newspapers, and he spent three years as publisher of Newsday, the Long Island daily.

His book,”Listening to America,” was the account of conversations with people, well-known and unknown, and it led naturally to his first “Bill Moyers’ Journals” on PBS from 1971 to 1976. As chief correspondent for “CBS Reports,” he made some memorable documentaries, but he was frustrated because they were erratically scheduled.

“Poor scheduling, poor promotion and unimaginative production” are the bane of documentarians, he says. He’d go back to the networks in a minute — if they asked him to come on over with his “Bill Moyers’ Journal” intact for at least a half-hour weekly of prime time. “I’d rather be doing what I’m doing for a mass audience,” he readily admits.

But he hasn’t been asked: “There’s my phone,” he says, ruefully, pointing. “Nobody ever calls me up to ask. It could be I’m too esoteric for CBS.”

What really bothers Moyers is the networks’ insistence on mass audiences for every one of their prime-time shows. “To say that an audience as to be as large as that of an entertainment program is a real sin. To say that 15 or 20 million people (the number who watched “CBS Reports” when Moyers was with the show) don’t deserve attention from television is to deny so much of this medium’s potential. When television is a monolith in which the only aim is the widest possible audience, you get the thinest gruel.”

Bill Moyers really talks like that. His thoughts pour out in complete sentences, feliciously phrased and expressed with the ordinariness, the everydayness, with which he converses with the guests on his “Journal.” No press representative sits in with him, and he’s not in the least hesitant about criticizing PBS as well as the networks.

He’s particularly fuming because the PBS schedulers want him to change the order of his programs so that one of them, “Get Pertschuk,” a documentary on Congress’ fight with Federal Trade Commission chairman Michael Pertschuk, won’t run on Mar. 6, during fundraising week. “Don’t put it on,” he was told, “it’s a dry subject.” Moyers hasn’t budged, and if they don’t use that show, he says, a bit heatedly for an extremely relaxed man, they can skip him during fundraising week.

“There is a creeping Neilsenism on PBS that disturbs me,” says Moyers, who is, for all that, a believer in fundraisers. “They make us in public broadcasting a little more aware of who our audiences are.”

But the idea of one of his “Journals” being considered too “dry” for membership week really bothers him. Moyers doesn’t believe any documentaries have to be dull. “The task of the journalist to to bring the best skills of narrative literature to any subject… to take serious subjects and tell them as Chaucer told the tales of his time.”

Two of Moyers’ teachers were among his many inspirers — Alice Cooke, a professor of English at the University of Texas and Eva Joy McGuffin, professor of English at Northern Texas State University. “They were so excited about and familiar with their material that as they spoke you could not but help see Chaucer’s character’s parade in front of you or feel the power of Wordworth’s poems.”

In translating this to television, Moyers believes “you need a story teller for the word to be made flesh.” And we’re running out of story-tellers. “A generation is passing in television,” Moyers muses. Cronkite, Severaid, Howard K. Smith. “I am in youngest end of it. The (Mike) Wallaces, the (Dan) Rathers, the Moyers,” he says, seem to be the last of their kind.

“This whole new generation of personalities, from Jane Pauley to Sue Simmons, to Chuck Scarborough are strangers to reporting, strangers to experience. It seems as if they were created out of whole cloth.” He does not doubt their sincerity, their decency, he says. “What worries me is that most of the young people don’t want to do documentaries, They’re too hard. It’s easier to sit at a desk and play at being serious than to go out and report.”

Somewhat Ironically, Moyers’ eldest, Cope, 20, a junior at Washington and Lee University, majoring in journalism, is bent on a newspaper career despite his father’s best efforts to “nudge him” in other directions, “Bearing the name of someone who is well known is a handicap for a son or daughter.”

Moyers has been frowning slightly as he talks about Cope’s career, then he grins. “He is a news-hawk,” he begins to brag. “He’s a better reporter than I am.” Cope is named after Millard Cope, the Texas newspaper publisher who gave Moyers his first job. He and his wife, Judith, also have a daughter. Suzanne, 17, and a younger son, John, 15.

Moyers has no idea what he’ll do or where he’ll go next. For one thing, he’d like steady, year-round work in his profession. When he’s not producing his “Journal,” he’s literally out in the cold. He says, mourningly, “I was not on the air when (former United Nations Ambassador) Andy Young left. I missed the hostages story, Afghanistan. All sorts of news events. As a journalist, it’s frustrating.”

If Moyers still worked for a newspaper, he’d probably be a columnist. Unfortunately, there are no “columnists” on television.