The Big Disconnect

From Hollywood’s Brilliant Coda to America’s Dark Year by Frank Rich:

Those at the top are separated from the consequences of their actions. They are exemplified by Robert Rubin, formerly of Citigroup and a mentor to both Obama’s Treasury secretary and chief economic adviser. He looked the other way when his bank made ruinous high-risk bets, and then cashed out and split, leaving taxpayers to pay for the wreckage while he escaped any accountability. Such economic wise men peer down at the country from a hermetically sealed bubble of privilege and self-interest, much as Ryan does from the plane flying him to his next mass firing. And they tend to think, as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs notoriously put it, that they are doing “God’s work” to sustain our free-market system.

From Comment Number 10 by Dim:

First of all, let me say thank you for such an insightful description of our current state of affairs, Mr. Rich, for pointing out so beautifully the disconnect between Wall Street and the rest of the country. President Obama also mentioned this in his weekly address today, but what bothers me is that, unlike you, he could actually do something about it! He keeps saying the right things but why doesn't he lead more forcefully? Why doesn't he keep up the pressure on Wall Street and on the Congress? Why doesn't he keep politicians of both parties accountable when they look after the interests of Wall Street and not the people? I know he has a lot on his plate, but I hope he is listening to people like you and taking these warnings a little bit more seriously. And I think that journalists like yourself should keep pressure on the President, keep him accountable for his actions instead of giving him a pass for simply saying the right things.

Meanwhile, most of the pundits effectively divide us so that the super rich and powerful can conquer us. As Bill Moyers frequently says, it’s not a question of left and right, it’s a question of top and bottom. (“…populism isn't really- and people's power, isn't really a left or right issue, is it? It's more us versus them, bottom versus top?”)

Bill Moyers Meditates On War

Here is Bill Moyers from the May 22, 2009 edition of Bill Moyers Journal:

…my friend Louis Bickford spends his days, and often his nights, on the healing and prevention of atrocities and crimes against humanity. Cruelty, horror, and misery are part of his portfolio at the International Center for Transitional Justice, along with the power of memory.

On The Huffington Post, Louis has an essay in which he says that Memorial Day is meant to remind us of the hardship of war. But he goes on to ask, "What does it mean to choose how to remember?" What does it say about us, for example, if "...we choose to remember the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, more in terms of heroism than error..." This, he reminds us, is the "...tendency of all nations."

Louis got me to thinking that when we meditate on war this weekend - our recent wars that is - will we overlook the suicides? Sweep under history's rug the recent murder in Iraq of five American soldiers by a comrade who may have been driven mad by the horrors around him? Will we forget the death from friendly fire of a Pat Tillman and the shameful cover-up by the brass, including the role of the very general who now heads our operations in Afghanistan?

What of all those villagers killed by drones remotely fired in our name? Why aren't they part of the narrative we tell ourselves about war? Louis Bickford wonders if we'll ever remember, "...that there was a place called Abu Ghraib on the dusty outskirts of Baghdad, and that torture took place there, for which we were responsible?" After all, he says, it was the complicity of Republicans, Democrats, journalists and lawyers - some of them scholars - that allowed us to ignore international and American law prohibiting torture.

Over some 40 years now it has seemed to me that as time goes by we tend to remember wars, and the suffering they bring, as if they were inevitable, natural acts of history, rather than politically inspired choices. But war, as was famously said, is politics by another means - the lethal legacy of failed leadership, enabled, even ennobled, by propaganda, the partisan opiate of politics. It is good to be reminded, as my friend Louis so eloquently reminds us, that war is too important to forget, and that's one reason to observe Memorial Day. There is another - to hold before our face a mirror, so that we might see the images of war reflected in our own eyes.

"The paradox of a Rush Limbaugh"

From Bill Moyers is Insightful, Erudite, Impassioned, Brilliant and the Host of PBS' "NOW":

BUZZFLASH: Have we created a circumstance where we have little perspective beyond the most recent news cycle? The words of the White House on one morning, for instance, may be contradicted by events in the afternoon, but the news coverage rarely seems to bring any information or comments from the past to compare them to the unfolding news of the moment. It's almost as if news no longer has a historical context.

MOYERS: Down the memory hole, as George Orwell would describe it. And yes, it's all about stimulation now. Watching the opening of the second game of the World Series, I was struck at how effectively the Fox producers mixed patriotic imagery with prurient promotions for upcoming programming in what amounted to a sedation of the viewer's critical faculty. It's a fitting metaphor, I think, for what's happening in politics as the mainstream media have been silenced and the partisan media have turned propaganda into "news." Wave the flag, stroke the sentiments, stir the prejudices -- and you can keep the masses distracted from the real game happening out of sight, behind closed doors in boardrooms and oval offices.

BUZZFLASH: And what is that game?

MOYERS: Class war. The corporate right and the political right declared class war on working people a quarter of a century ago and they've won. The rich are getting richer, which arguably wouldn't matter if the rising tide lifted all boats. But the inequality gap is the widest it's been since l929; the middle class is besieged and the working poor are barely keeping their heads above water. The corporate and governing elites are helping themselves to the spoils of victory -- politics, when all is said and done, comes down to who gets what and who pays for it -- while the public is distracted by the media circus and news has been neutered or politicized for partisan purposes.

Take the paradox of a Rush Limbaugh, ensconced in a Palm Beach mansion massaging the resentments across the country of white-knuckled wage earners, who are barely making ends meet in no small part because of the very policies of those corporate and ideological forces for whom Rush has been a hero. I recently came across an account of the tabloid era of British journalism in the late 1950s when the Daily Mirror, for one, presented itself as the champion of the working man, fearlessly speaking truth to power, when out of sight its gluttonous and egomaniacal chairman was demanding and extorting favors from frightened or like-minded politicians and generally helping himself to greater portions of privilege like any other press baron. It's the same story for Limbaugh, Murdoch and his minions, and the tycoons of the megamedia conglomerates. They helped create the new Gilded Age to whose largesse they have so generously helped themselves while throwing the populace off the trail with red meat served up in the guise of journalism.

As Eric Alterman reports in his recent book -- a book that I'm proud to have helped make happen -- part of that red meat strategy is to attack mainstream media relentlessly, knowing that if the press is effectively intimidated, either by the accusation of liberal bias or by a reporter's own mistaken belief in the charge's validity, the institutions that conservatives revere -- corporate America, the military, organized religion, and their own ideological bastions of influence -- will be able to escape scrutiny and increase their influence over American public life with relatively no challenge. Eric calls it "working the refs," and it's worked.

This Site May Harm Your Computer

This is weird. I just googled Bill Moyers. All the results tell me that “This site may harm your computer.” Even pbs.org and wikipedia. What’s going on here Mr. Google?

Update:
It’s not doing it anymore. Apparently Mr. Google thinks Bill Moyers is now safe for computer consumption.

Charles Keating And John McCain Versus William Ayers And Barack Obama

The link between Charles Keating and John McCain is more than “guilt by association.” John McCain abused his power as a member of Congress.

The link between William Ayers and Barack Obama is “guilt by association.” If Obama used his power to favor Ayers it would become more than “guilt by association.” So far, Obama has not done this.

From Democrats in guilt-by-association counterpunch by Geoff Elliott:

Mr Keating owned the Lincoln Savings and Loan group and contributed more than $US100,000 to Senator McCain's political campaigns in the 80s.

When federal regulators began looking into Lincoln's questionable lending practices and investments, Mr Keating turned to five senators whose campaigns he had helped fund, including Senator McCain.

Senator McCain attended two meetings with regulators at Mr Keating's request, and in subsequent congressional hearings it emerged Senator McCain's position was that he was seeking information on behalf of a constituent who was an important employer in his state. But the regulators concluded Senator McCain was pressuring them to act favourably for Mr Keating.

The Lincoln group's collapse cost US taxpayers more than $US2 billion. Mr Keating spent four years in jail before his sentence was overturned on a technicality. A Senate ethics committee report found Senator McCain had been guilty of "poor judgment".

In a world filled with political corruption this may not rank as one of the worst things that a politician can do, but it wasn’t the right thing to do. Even John McCain says that it wasn’t. Do we want to trust John McCain and his “poor judgment” to lead us as President of the United States?

I watched Bill Moyers Journal last Friday and was very disappointed to hear this exchange between Mr. Moyers and Kathleen Hall Jamieson:

BILL MOYERS: There was an Obama film released this week that offended me as a journalist because they used the filmmaking process to suggest the credibility for the charge about McCain and the Keating Five that they wouldn't have had in a 30-second commercial. Take a look at this.

[OBAMA CAMPAIGN AD] MALE NARRATOR: If you think about what fraud is. Fraud is the creation of trust and then its betrayal.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Well, this — first, this is a web ad of some sorts. I mean, I don't know if you call something that long an ad. But it's a web ad. You see it on the web. It's not the documentary form that's problematic. It's the inference that's invited by juxtaposition.

And this has been a week of juxtaposition. We've got William Ayers, Barack Obama friends in one set of claims. You've got all the scandals of the current weeks on Wall Street allied to McCain.

And we put them together, draw the inference that it's causal, draw the inference that he really was responsible, not that there was a Keating Five, that he was the most responsible, and that somehow it's linked to all of these current scandals that we have right now. And so what we have in this past week is a text, you know, kind of textbook case of guilty by association and argument from juxtaposition.

BILL MOYERS: Is that the pattern of consequential deception that emerged this week in both the stump speeches and the ad? Was there a theme to this week's ugly politics?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Well, the first theme to the ugly politics is deception about each other's policy positions that will relate to governance.

That's the first category this week. Meaningful policy deception. You draw inferences from those about the candidates' stance, and you're wrong. You draw inferences about what they'll do in governance, and you're wrong. The second category is this guilt by association and argument by visual juxtaposition.

And the American people need to say about that what relevance does any of that juxtaposition have for governance? First, what's the inference and is it accurate? But secondly, does it pass the test of relevance even when you come down to what's accurate? I'd like to say about all of these guilt-by-association moves, first, what are the basic facts? Let's make sure we've got those right.

And then based on what we know, what do you infer about how they would act as president, about how they would engaged in policy decision making, about the policies they would offer? And if the answer is, I can't find any way that it forecasts any of that, do we actually believe that because William Ayers hosted a coffee for Barack Obama and they served on a board together and they had some association of school reform efforts in Chicago that Barack Obama supports what William Ayers did?

It reminds me of something that happened in 1964, but we have a change now. And one of the questions underlying all questions about dirty politics are, is it different or not? And here's the difference. In 1964, the team that you were part of or the administration that you were a part of-

BILL MOYERS: Right.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Put together an ad that shows pictures of the Ku Klux Klan and burning crosses and Klansmen marching. And it's very evocative. It's very powerful. A drum is beating in the background.

MALE NARRATOR: "We represent the majority of the people in Alabama who hate niggerism, Catholicism, Judaism, and all the -isms in the whole world." So said Robert Creel, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. He also said, "I like Barry Goldwater, I believe what he believes in."

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Now, Barry Goldwater had repudiated that endorsement. The campaign in '64 decided not to air that very expensively produced ad because they were afraid if they aired it, it would create a backlash. And I went through all the records in the LBJ Library. And I didn't find anybody standing up and saying, "It would be morally wrong to do it." But I did find people who thought that it would create a backlash.

Now, why were they concerned? If Goldwater had repudiated the endorsement, they assumed that the press would point it out and the public would be smart enough to say, "Well, then it means nothing." It means that these horrible despicable people have endorsed, but it doesn't mean anything. Barry Goldwater has repudiated. Now let's jump forward. William Ayers, Barack Obama. Barack Obama has repudiated what William Ayers did in the Weather Underground — '64 it didn't become part of the campaign.

BILL MOYERS: Right.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Now it is. That's a change. And it says our tolerance for those kinds of inappropriate inferences is different. The confidence that that inference somehow is legitimate now where there wasn't confidence that it was in '64 is now present. And that's problematic. I worry about that.

And I worry about on the other side, by the way, about Senator McCain. What does it mean that he was involved in the Keating Five scandal? Well, first, we need to get the facts right. But more importantly, he has said it was the worst mistake of his life.

BILL MOYERS: He's repented that.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: He has essentially said he's learned from it. Do we now draw the inference that because of it he's going to act as he did back then in whatever way was inappropriate back then, if he becomes president? Or do we believe that he learned from it and, as a result, he's far less likely to act in any way that would suggest that kind of a problem?

If you looked at his career since then, you'd say reasonably the inference is he learned a lesson and he will not go anywhere near that kind of problem in the future. That's what motivated McCain-Feingold. That's what motivated his attacks on earmarks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the notion that something can be accurate but not relevant is one that we're missing as we assess these claims.

This is what offended Bill Moyers. Why he finds it offensive baffles me. To the best of my knowledge it is factually accurate. What more do you need? How can Moyers be offended by someone else doing essentially the same thing that he does every week?

I believe that Kathleen Hall Jamieson is stretching the truth when she says that we “… draw the inference that it's causal, draw the inference that he really was responsible, not that there was a Keating Five, that he was the most responsible, and that somehow it's linked to all of these current scandals that we have right now.” This is not the conclusion that I draw from the Obama video. It is ridiculous to say that McCain is responsible for the current financial crisis. It is not ridiculous to conclude that McCain’s past record in Congress is a questionable one. I believe that this is what the Obama video is trying to say.

I believe that Kathleen Hall Jamieson is going too far when she says that “… the inference is he learned a lesson and he will not go anywhere near that kind of problem in the future.” Also when she says: “ So the notion that something can be accurate but not relevant is one that we're missing as we assess these claims.” The fact that McCain said he learned from his “mistake” is relevant, but so is the fact that he made the mistake in the first place. We should let the voters decide how important all of this is, not the media, not Kathleen Hall Jamieson.

I believe that Kathleen Hall Jamieson is correct in her assessment of Obama and Ayers, however, I think that her assessment of McCain and Keating is incorrect. I am also disappointed in both Jamieson and Moyers for following the recent media trend of lumping both of these issues together as if they were the same, when they are not. I also think that Bill Moyers should think about replacing Jamieson, or at least limiting her time on the air, and letting someone else give their viewpoint.

I am disappointed in Bill Moyers over this. I expect better from him. Apparently I am not the only one who feels this way. A look at the comments in response to Partisanship, Dirty Politics, and the Truth shows that others feel the way that I do.

From Robert O’Brien:

I have to take issue with what Kathleen Hall Jamieson said on your October 10th show about smear campaigns. While it's true that the Ayers business is simply nonsense, I believe that the Keating Five story is completely relevant today. His profuse apologies notwithstanding, Senator McCain was involved in a sleazy operation that ultimately cost taxpayers a lot of money (maybe not compared to the $850 billion tab we have now, but still a lot).

McCain has been a champion of deregulation his whole public career, and deregulation is what got us in our present predicament.

Obama, by contrast, is guilty of nothing vis-à-vis Bill Ayers.

Ms. Jamieson is guilty of offering one of those false equivalencies Paul Krugman has been talking about.

From Louis Erlanger:

I was very disappointed in Dr. Jamieson's discussion of "dirty politics". Comparing the Keating Five scandal to Barack Obama's association with William Ayers is comparing apples to oranges. John McCain was part of the Keating Five scandal. He lobbied to push back regulation of the Lincoln Savings and Loan after receiving favors from Keating. Regretting that he took part does not absolve him of guilt, and he has continued to oppose most attempts at regulations in the financial sector. Barack Obama served on a board with William Ayers and participated in functions that Ayers also participated in, but he was not involved in any of Ayers' activities as a Weatherman. In fact, he has spoken out against Ayers' past radical activities, and has only supported Ayers' work in the education arena.

In addition, Dr. Jamieson's comments about Social Security are just plain wrong. She said that if Social Security had been privatized before the current economic crisis, no one would have lost money because the Social Security dollars would have been invested in instruments that are outside of the current failing market. I would love to know what instruments those are, because I'd like to invest in them, and I'm sure the rest of your viewers would too.

This was the first time on Bill Moyers' Journal that I have seen attempts to present a "balanced" view at the expense of the truth, a practice that has made the mainstream media such a poor source of good information. Let's hope we do not see any more of this in the future.

I am also disappointed in Frank Rich. In an otherwise excellent op-ed he wrote:

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin.

This is in reference to the same things that Moyers and Jamieson were talking about. Rich makes an excellent point about the “Weimar-like rage” and I totally agree with him. It is despicable. What troubles me is what is left out of the picture that Rich portrays. There is more that “makes them different” than simply rage and anger. The facts make them different. Obama has not abused his power to do favors for Ayers, McCain did abuse his power for Keating. I wish that Rich would have written at least one sentence pointing out that this also "makes them different."

If we were to use the McCain standard of guilt-by-association (and take it just a little bit further), then we are all friends with terrorists, including John McCain. After all, both Obama and McCain belong to the same organization.

Update:
Am I "smearing" Obama? I feel so dirty. Talk about guilt by association.

When The Donothingers Actually Do Something

I happen to have missed this little bit of news. I was reading the transcript for Bill Moyers Journal for July 11, 2008 and came across this:

BILL MOYERS: And after crusading for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, conservatives pushing family values turned out to be their own worst enemies. Some of their foot soldiers in politics and the religious right were outed for adultery, stalking Capitol Hill pages, soliciting sex. Believe it or not, just the other day Senator Larry Craig, who had been arrested for lewd conduct in a public bathroom, and Senator David Vitter, a strict moralist revealed to have been a frequent customer of brothels, signed on as co-sponsors of the Republicans' Marriage Protection Amendment.

I read that, and I’m thinking what is “the Republicans' Marriage Protection Amendment”? So I googled it and found out it is that stupid amendment to ban gay marriage. Obviously my brain must still be in first gear.

Let’s take a look at who else is sponsoring this Bill:

Wayne Allard (R-CO) was named by Time magazine in 2006 as one of "America's 5 Worst Senators."

Sam Brownback (R-KS) who once, while on the Senate floor, put words in the mouth (didn’t know they had one, but how else can they speak?) of an embryo: “Are you going to kill me?”

Richard Burr (R-NC) who once said of George W. Bush: "I'm not embarrassed to vote with the president 96 percent of the time. He's right that often."

Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) who once said: "We need better intelligence. If we had better intelligence in the Civil War we'd be quoting Jefferson Davis, not Lincoln."

Mike Crapo (R-ID) who managed in 2005 to receive “more than twice as much money in donations from people in the U.S. Virgin Islands than from his home state.” He does not support health care for American Veterans, but does support guns in our parks.

James DeMint (R-SC) who once said: "If a person is a practicing homosexual, they should not be teaching in our schools." He later said he felt the same "if a single woman who is pregnant and living with her boyfriend should be hired to teach my third-grade children."
Michael Enzi (R-WY) introduced HIMMAA to the Senate.

Lindsey Graham (R-SC) even racist conservatives don’t like him.

James Inhofe (R-OK) who once said: ”As I said on the Senate floor on July 28, 2003, ‘much of the debate over global warming is predicated on fear, rather than science.’ I called the threat of catastrophic global warming the ‘greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,’ a statement that, to put it mildly, was not viewed kindly by environmental extremists and their elitist organizations.”

Johnny Isakson (R-GA) who once said “Robert Reich, once observed ‘most minimum wage workers aren’t poor.’ He is right.” (Yes, you guessed it, Isakson is a multi-millionaire. I'd like to call him an asshole, but I'm too polite.)

Jon Kyl (R-AZ) was named by Time magazine in 2006 as one of "America's Best Senators." Go figure.

Pat Roberts (R-KS) who supposedly leaked classified intel hurting efforts to find Saddam Hussein.

Richard Shelby (R-AL) who also supposedly leaked classified information.

John Thune (R-SD) doesn’t like children.

Roger Wicker (R-MS) apparently accepted illegal campaign contributions.

Placing the importance of one or two religious issues above everything else and, because of that, voting for people like these is suicidal, to say the least.

Lastly, I would just like to say that this post was way too much work. That old saying about the do-nothing Congress appears to be true. Trying to find out what all of these guys have actually done was murder. Wayne Allard is the best example of a do-nothinger.

Why is it that when the donothingers actually do something it usually pisses me off?

Unbalanced Unfairness

From Media complicit in making Wright look bad by Kenneth F. Bunting:

Barack Obama's forceful denunciation and disavowal of his former pastor doesn't change the fact that it is an irrelevant distraction entirely created by cable television pundits using out-of-context and skewed sound bites.

Moyers' illuminating interview with Wright didn't fit the narrative that portrays Wright as an unpatriotic hatemonger with outrageous views. Moyers played longer excerpts of the very same sermons of which the seconds-long snippets had been aired over and over.

Wright, responding in the Moyers interview in a conversational style, came across as a reasonable man, hurt by what he felt were unfair portrayals, but not immodest. He and Moyers talked about his scholarly influences and his impressive 36-year ministry at the Chicago church where he met Obama.

At the end of it, I wondered if the pundits who had been so obsessed with Wright and so determined to define him had watched it and how they would treat it. For the next 30 hours I flipped repeatedly between CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

Nothing. It was as if Wright's first extended interview hadn't taken place. Even on networks that had teased the Moyers interview repeatedly, using excerpts from the two-minutes of it that PBS had posted in advance on its Web site, there was no comment, no analysis, no report about what had been said in the interview.

Fair and balanced, indeed.

And the best that Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich can come up with is to call Bill Moyers names. How mature of them. Unlike them, Bill Moyers deserves our respect. He has earned it.

Obama And Wright

Barack Obama talks about the way things could be. Jeremiah Wright talks about the way things are and the way things used to be. Both are right to talk about these things. Are our brains so tiny that we can’t hold both viewpoints in our head at the same time?

Wright says some things that are correct and some things that are incorrect. His incorrect statements do not make the correct ones any less true. Wright can be odd and flamboyant. His behavior does not make his correct statements any less true. Are our brains so tiny that we can’t sort out the difference?

Obama is a politician, Wright is a preacher; I don’t trust either of them. However, I think that my brain is big enough to sort out the truth from the bullshit. If you’d like help with the sorting, here’s a suggestion: go to Bill Moyers for the truth on Wright, go to Sean Hannity for the bullshit.

Dave Winer On Moyers-Wright

From Why Is It So Quiet After the Moyers-Wright Interview? by Dave Winer:

I expected a roaring debate in the political blogosphere this morning, and on cable news after the Friday night Bill Moyers interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Instead, there's eerie quiet.

The most I could find was this post on Protein Wisdom saying that Moyers didn't play hardball with Wright. It's true, he didn't. Instead he did what I wish more journalists would, he interviewed him in a way that helped us get to know the person. He let him speak his piece, so we could listen.

There's so much to admire about Rev. Wright, but first, the shame of the professional media, who hounded not only Wright, but members of his congregation, including a woman in a hospice, to try to uncover more dirt about Wright and thereby embarrass Barack Obama.

Bill Moyers Must Be Doing Something Right

Since it seems that Bill Moyers has pissed off the political right with his interview of the religious Wright, I conclude that Bill Moyers must be doing something right.

From O’Reilly Attacks Moyers For Interviewing Rev. Wright: They Should ‘Take A Long Vacation, Perhaps In Iran’ by Matt:

On PBS’s Bill Moyers Journal last night, Moyers interviewed Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, whose controversial remarks created a political storm last month.

Reacting to advance excerpts of the interview, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly attacked Moyers on his show last night, calling him a “far left PBS guy” who is “extreme” and “pathetic.” At the end of his Talking Points Memo segment, O’Reilly suggested that Moyers and Wright should “take a long vacation, perhaps in Iran.”

Later in the show, when O’Reilly asked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich if he could “figure” Moyers out, Gingrich called Moyers “a hard left sympathizer for anybody who dislikes America”.

Jumping On The Onion Bandwagon

The Onion seems to be very popular this weekend. Bill Moyers admited that he loves The Onion on Friday nights broadcast of Bill Moyers Journal. Today there was a feature about The Onion on CBS Sunday Morning. So, in the spirit of American excess here is more of The Onion:

In The Know: How Can We Make The War In Iraq More Eco-Friendly?

Corporations Are Killing Individuality

Lee Camp appeared on FoxNews the other day. He went off script at the end and completely baffled everyone involved. Millions of people dead? Who cares, we must talk about Captain Kirk and sex. The requirements for being hired by FoxNews must be that you are brain-dead and have sold your soul to the company store. This type of discussion is what we see every day on television. No one is allowed to go off script, no one can take the time for depth and relevance. Move on quickly, we need to talk about Britney now. Bill Moyers is an exception to this. Even if you disagree with his content, you can’t disagree with the fact that he is one of the few interviewers who does interviewing the right way. Mr. Moyers treats his guests with respect, listens to them and actually HEARS what they say. He responds to his guests in real-time, not from a script. There is actual thinking involved on his part. By him, not what someone is telling him to think. He never tells his guest to “shut-up.” We need MORE ideas and viewpoints expressed, not less. Why was there no discussion on FoxNews of something as important as millions of people dead? It is childlike behavior. Pretend it’s not there, and then it really doesn’t exist.

Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers is an outstanding journalist. I wish all Americans would tune into his PBS show, Bill Moyers Journal, at least once in awhile. At the very least, his show is an example of civil discourse. We could use a lot more of this on the airwaves, since it is virtually nonexistent. Why Americans tolerate the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly is a mystery to me. Their views could be expressed without all the meanness and yelling, and name-calling. Where is the responsibility of the stations’ owners? Don’t they have a civic responsibility to some sort of broadcasting standard? Do they let their young children or grandchildren listen to Rush Limbaugh or someone similar? Would they like their children to speak to them as Rush Limbaugh does to his audience? Or, worse yet, Ann Coulter?

On the Bill Moyers Journal broadcast on January 4, 2008, two of the guests were Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. How refreshing to see Mr. Moyers give these two gentlemen the respect they deserve. When Mr. Moyers does an interview he does not shout at his guest, he does not interrupt his guest, he actually listens to them and asks pertinent follow-up questions. This is in sharp contrast to someone like Matt Lauer who seems to have to mock everyone within hearing distance of him.