Still the best of our village explainers Moyers isn’t the hip new host, but his show may demonstrate what PBS could do in public affairs Originally published in Current, March 11, 2002 Critique by Christopher Lydon Keep in mind the questions to which Now with Bill Moyers became the answer. Could a fresh Friday night public affairs show from PBS co-opt not just some NPR staff but also the sensibility and audience of public radio? Could PBS jumpstart a production team to cover breaking news with you-are-there authority? Could public television find a hip 21st-century face with some of the quirky charisma of, say, Ira Glass? And the old stand-by: Could PBS find a way out of its earnest and elderly demographic to a younger, broader public? (Answers, in the case of Now with Bill Moyers: no, no, no and no again.) But there were heavier questions, too. Could PBS invent a mixed magazine format to encompass experimental photo essays, commentary, documentary production and interviewing? Could noncommercial TV journalism set a standard a mite livelier than the over-balanced Bible of the Beltway, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer? Most important: Could the public network rise to the awful challenge of Sept. 11 with reportage and reflection as persistent and deep as the wound to the country? (My answers come up: yes, yes and, well, almost). PBS, in short, undertook to launch a bright and shiny news vehicle for the Pat Mitchell era, but in a crisis found itself dusting off its venerated MVP of endless seasons past. And he is still, to my mind, the best we have in the ranks of electronic daddies and village explainers. Moyers is the broadest in the curiosity and craft of his journalism, which is to say in the independent quality of his thinking. He’s the largest, furthermore, in the dimensions of public manhood that he brings to this job of detailing and assessing our American predicament at home and in the world. Granting a certain churchiness of Chaplain Moyers’ manner and mind, give him credit for passing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s test of the true preacher: His words are "rammed with life," drawn from his own autobiography. Unlike the dry formalist in the pulpit who never lets on "that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated or chagrined," Emerson said, "the true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life—life passed through the fire of thought." This is what binds us peculiarly to Bill Moyers: that his struggles in Christian faith and with Lyndon Johnson, his attachment to civil rights and deep reading, his long observation of the Texas oil oligarchy and his prophetic wars on PAC money all keep revealing themselves. We know Bill Moyers better than any of the network news anchors. There is continuity in his story. "Welcome to a work in progress," he said, opening the first episode of Now with Bill Moyers. He might better have said "a life in progress." Most TV stars are careers in progress. Moyers shows us the life of a searcher who remembers where he’s been. In the fourth week of Now, after a chilling video piece on the chaos of civilian casualties in Afghanistan, Moyers observed: "Why then bother even trying to sort out the unintended but inevitable human cost of war to those caught in the crossfire? Well, some of you will remember that I was the White House spokesman for part of the Vietnam War. You try to sort these things out as best you can to discount the thrill of war for those who advocate it but never have to suffer from it." Moyers’ asides are important. Grilling an imam on Islamic militancy, only Moyers would note modestly that, of course, "I grew up singing, ‘Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the Cross of Jesus, going on before.'" It is good to hear Moyers drop lines about "the cheerleading press, in Washington and elsewhere," or about "that old fraternity of oil and gas men" gathered around the Bush-Cheney White House. "No strangers here," as Moyers said. He’s not giving us news there, just a wink of recognition that he knows as much as we citizens know. And then there are the instant sermons, breaking into a conversation with political scientist Benjamin Barber, for example, about the defeat of democracy by money. Moyers flamed up: "I mean, for years now the ruling ideology, the ruling religion of America, has been free markets. Its god is profit. Its heaven is the corporate boardroom. Its hell is regulation. Its Bible is the Wall Street Journal. Its choir of angels is the corporate media. You’ve got a religion of free markets in this country that’s established in the political culture as well. How could you expect to have a Reformation?" Liberal and skeptic, Moyers is happy to run against the media pack that’s lionizing President Bush. I was a little surprised to hear him tell the novelist James Carroll, "I support the strategic aims of this war, and I don’t think it’s a misguided mission in Afghanistan." Another guest, Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch, voiced what sounds like Moyers doctrine: "There’s a tendency in times of war for the American people unfortunately to become yes-men. ... To be patriotic is not to be yes-men. To be patriotic is to ask questions and to find out what’s going on." So he’s no ditto-head, for sure, but not exactly a dissenter either. To my taste the most memorable piece on Now so far was not by Moyers. It was a remarkable pas de deux by the videographer Jon Alpert and the New Yorkiest Afghan woman I could ever have imagined, Masuda Sultan. They opened the report at the lip of Ground Zero. Ms. Sultan spoke of wanting to rebuild. But they flew from there—our hearts in our mouths with them—to the village of Chukar in Afghanistan, where Masuda Sultan grew up and where 19 relatives, indigent peasants, had been killed by American bombing. "They were cousins and uncles, not Taliban," she told the U.S. military briefing officer. With New York fluency and urgency, she carried on: "I want to say, ‘thank you’ for ousting the Taliban and for keeping us Americans at home safe. But my family was killed in this, too . . . by American soldiers. What’s the logic of targeting this village in the middle of nowhere?" "No information on it," the briefing officer said. The smashed sand castle of her cousins’ compound, the survivor rolling in a kind of frenzy of remorse on the rubble, the empty landscape to the far horizon and the frozen blue sky above were all shot, I supposed, with a digital camera, hand-held by a master at a new craft. It was as close as I’d been to this war; and the voice and imagery in the piece were as close to a breakthrough as Moyers has given us in the storytelling power of TV. Or perhaps it was a glimpse of the talent PBS needs to get beyond Moyers. [Transcript of the Feb. 8 report on the series' website.] A big disappointment so far is the feedback forum on pbs.org. Viewers are insistently reminded to join the Now conversation on the PBS website. [Link to the series' talk-back webpage.] Six weeks into the series, they have posted fewer than 2,000 messages. Many are one-shot comments, for or against Moyers or his guest. Very few cluster in sustained discussion. An astonishing portion, maybe half the total, flame back and forth on the subject of a single short segment. Amber Amundson lost her husband Craig in his Pentagon office on Sept. 11. Her father vowed furiously, "We’re going to get the ones that did this," but Amber recoiled. "My heart sank," she said, "because the way people would try to comfort me would mean more death." Instead she wrote "a widow’s plea for peace" and toured the country with it. A nasty near-riot ensued on the Now website. Posters who said they’d served on military assignments with the Amundsons charged that Amber from way back had been a professional pothead, a complainer and all-around pain in the neck. She had some defenders on the pot-smoking charge, and a few more ("You go, girl") for her antiwar activism. But suddenly Moyers’ whole exercise in seeing Sept. 11 in the microcosm of one family had plummeted into a thoroughly ugly name-calling contest—in the name of "continuing the discussion." Which brings me to my last misgiving about Now with Bill Moyers. I’ve always suspected that television, good and bad, is all inescapably sedative. There are points of light here, but no call to action. Moyers’ tone is elegiac, almost despairing. Rage is missing as much as humor. The voices we imagine hearing under the credits are, first, Moyers in a lamentation, "My God, how did it come to this?" And then the voice of his audience: "Dearie, it’s time for bed." Christopher Lydon covered national politics in the 1970s for the Washington Bureau of the New York Times and hosted The Ten O'Clock News on WGBH, Boston, through the 1980s. In the 1990s he was founding host of The Connection on WBUR, Boston, and other public radio stations.

Give Chaplain Moyers credit for passing Emerson's test of a true preacher. His words are "rammed with life." Jon Alpert and Masuda Sultan's Feb. 8 report from Afghanistan was "as close to a breakthrough as Moyers has given us in the storytelling power of TV," Lydon writes. "Or perhaps it was a glimpse of the talent PBS needs to get beyond Moyers."

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Web page posted March 13, 2002
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