I was scanning my radio on the way home last night and stumbled across an interview with Bill Moyers on the “progressive” radio show, Democracy Now!, hosted by Amy Goodman.
Bill Moyers is the poster boy for the type of liberal activist “journalist” that your hard earned tax money has been squandered on by Public Broadcasting. Appearing on the independent news program Democracy Now!, Bill Moyers had the following to say about Jeremiah Wright Moyers whom he interviewed before Wright forced Obama to denounce him with more inflammatory rhetoric before the NAACP and the National Press Club:
And it was a reasonable, interesting, revealing conversation. I’m not a very adversarial fellow. I’m not a gotcha kind of journalist. Mike Wallace can do that much better than I can. And it was a very reasonable interview. But I think that the pent-up frustration of how he was being treated in the mainstream media and the fact that he was being taken out of context—the remark about chickens come home to roost, he wasn’t saying that 9/11 was done because—as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said, because God wanted it to happen, but that there are consequences to actions.
The remark about HIV, I didn’t get to ask him that on the show. We ran out of time. But, you know, in the black community, where I’ve reported, done documentaries on black churches, black community organizers, in the black community, they’re still haunted by the fact, what is a historical fact, that the United States government used black men at Tuskegee Institute who think they were being treated for syphilis, when they were being allowed to die for a scientific test. That anger has been building up. I understand that. It’s unfortunate it gets in the mainstream media and Obama has to do what he did.
Surprisingly and to Amy Goodman’s credit she pressed Moyers on criticism that he didn’t actually ask any tough questions or show any journalistic integrity by actually pressing Wright on the opinions that he was presenting on PBS:
AMY GOODMAN: On the interview, the PBS ombudsman commented about it. He wrote a column critical of your questioning. Michael Getler wrote, “There were not enough questions asked and some that were asked came across as too reserved and too soft, considering the volatility of the charges. […] Statements that Moyers himself laid out at the top of the program went largely unchallenged and those that did come up didn’t really get addressed until well into the hour-long program.” Your response to that?
To which Mr. Moyers just punted. He was just going to rely on others to actually practice journalism:
BILL MOYERS: Well, that’s true. I didn’t get to ask all the questions I wanted to ask. It was a forty-minute interview. And I was much more interested—I knew what was going to happen when he went to the National Press Club on Monday morning. I knew that they were going to be asking all of these questions. I leave that to those people whose job it is for the commercial media.
[Update #1: 5/8/2008]
I’m listening to Mark Levin’s show from yesterday online and he has great coverage of this. You can download the program from here.
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