Bill Moyers

TOM HARKIN. Paul Tsongas. Bill Clinton. Tweedledum. Tweedledee. Unless other candidates enter the field, one of those men will be the Democratic opponent for George Bush in 1992. If so, the "D" by the candidate's name on the ballot won't just stand for Democrat. It will stand for "Doomed."The party would do better to look outside the politics-is-my-life crowd and nominate a small-d democrat whose vision for America is based on an understanding deeper than a pollster's charts. The Democrats should draft Bill Moyers.

CHICAGO -- In a rare interview, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. said news media organizations that circulated controversial sound bites of his sermons on the Internet wanted to paint him as "un-American" or "some sort of fanatic" in order to bring down Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. "I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ," Wright told journalist Bill Moyers in the first interview he has granted since comments critical of U.S. policies surfaced on television and the Internet.

I think the 1990s can be as much of a transformation in world affairs as that decade when Columbus came to the New World.But it requires telling the truth about ourselves to ourselves.-- Bill Moyers Earlier this month, in the opening episode of his new 26-part series, "Listening to America," Bill Moyers offered a warning."You may want to put your children to bed," he said gravely. "It's not a pretty sight."In that episode, Mr. Moyers was talking about the way big-money special interest groups are buying control of the U.S. government; but his words also apply to other programs in the series.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Past the images of escalating chaos in Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the triumph of mankind's entry into space, at the top of a marble staircase at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library here, was Lady Bird Johnson. Her coffin draped simply and unadorned by flowers as thousands of mourners filed past, Johnson, as she so often did in life, once again offered a bit of calm amid the tumult of history vividly on display all around her. Johnson died Tuesday at age 94, and at her funeral yesterday afternoon at the Riverbend Centre church, representatives of first families stretching back half a century to the Eisenhower administration came to pay their condolences.

You can get a better tour of Florence in 90 minutes on PBS tonight than most visitors do in a couple of days spent trudging around the Italian city.You are brought there by an intelligent, inquisitive tourist who happens to have access to the best tour guides Florence can provide -- Bill Moyers. Last night, he spent 90 minutes on the Iran-Contra scandal. Tonight, it's 90 minutes in Florence. And you wonder why he left CBS for PBS."The Power of the Past: Florence," which will be on Maryland Public Television, channels 22 and 67, at 9 o'clock, is not just a quick and easy tour of art history's greatest hits.

ON AND OFF THE AIR:* What we really should want is to get the politicians "Listening to America," not just the PBS viewers who tune in commentator Bill Moyers' latest series premiering tonight.Continuing through the elections in November, the program (at 10 o'clock on Maryland Public Television) promises exploration of the issues of campaign '92 that go well beyond the headline topics of who may or may not have committed adultery, dodged the draft or smoked marijuana.For instance, the first two episodes, "America: What Went Wrong," focus on the award-winning Philadelphia Inquirer series (and book)

WASHINGTON -- Midway through his State of the Union Address, President Bush delivered a line that was not intended for you and me. He pledged, with enthusiasm, to "modify the passive loss rule for active real estate developers." Members of Congress clapped -- and the rest of us wondered what the devil the president was talking about.He was, it turned out, talking about a giant tax break for wealthy real estate developers -- the folks who build office buildings and shopping centers. These same real estate moguls are the folks who helped put Mr. Bush in the White House by giving big money to political action committees that promoted Mr. Bush's candidacy.

Mike Wallace of CBS' "60 Minutes," television's best-known investigative reporter, has trained his sights on an unexpected prey -- Bill Moyers, the public television commentator and former CBS News analyst.Mr. Wallace and the people at "60 Minutes" say it's nothing personal, just an attempt to take a critical look at Mr. Moyers, whose PBS work, after all, is supported partly by tax dollars.But Mr. Moyers says the story behind the story is that Morley Safer, now of "60 Minutes," has harbored a fierce dislike for him ever since Mr. Moyers worked as President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary and Mr. Safer covered Vietnam for CBS."

Television hates death. Death makes people uncomfortable, and uncomfortable translates to tune-out in terms of viewers. That is reason enough for me to sing the praises of Bill Moyers and PBS for "On Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying," a brave and unblinking look at death and the politics of dying how and where we want. "Moyers on Dying" is uneven, too often marred by cliched visuals and a downright clunky editing style that fails to find a rhythm to some of the stories it is trying to tell.

Bill Moyers is taking rather wicked delight in a tabloidesque tale that he recently read, one literally as old as the Bible. Genesis, in fact, Chapter 27, in which Rebekah, the family matriarch, conspires with her favored son Jacob to trick his brother out of his birthright."

William Cope Moyers seemed to have it all. He was the son of Bill Moyers, the White House wunderkind under Lyndon B. Johnson who went on to a stellar career in journalism that is still continuing on your local PBS station. The younger Moyers followed his father into that profession and the skids were greased. He zoomed up the ladder, working in his father's native state at a newspaper in Dallas. He excelled at Newsday on Long Island, where his father had once been publisher. He worked in his father's TV documentary production company.

Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting board member who in May charged PBS with liberal bias, abruptly resigned yesterday in the face of an internal investigative report that is expected to charge him with using questionable tactics and trying to undermine the political independence of public television and radio. Tomlinson, who was chairman of the CPB board when he made the allegations, stepped down from that post last month when his term expired - but only after hand-picking a successor, as well as a new president of CPB who was a former Republican official.

Under intense questioning in a Senate hearing, the beleaguered chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting defended yesterday what some Senators view as his effort to tilt PBS programming toward the right. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson told the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services he was just seeking a political balance when he complained in 2003 that Now With Bill Moyers (which continues without him as Now in a half-hour format) lacked balance. "Public broadcasting would do well to reflect conservative points of view as it did so eloquently liberal points of view," said Tomlinson, who described Moyers' show as "political advocacy broadcasting."

"It's dM-ijM-` vu all over again," says public broadcast pioneer James Day. In quoting baseball and malaprop Hall of Famer Yogi Berra, Day was referring to recent reports about the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting investigating public broadcasting for political "balance." "It happened in the Nixon years particularly," says Day, who helped found San Francisco's public television station, KQED, in 1953. "When Nixon finally appointed the majority on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting board, it in effect began to take over programming, even though it was not supposed to do that," he says.

IN AMERICAN journalism, the year ended with a loss. Bill Moyers, anchor of PBS' NOW, has retired. More than a skilled reporter of the daily fare, Mr. Moyers was fascinated not only by the deeper trends in our public life but also by the larger philosophical controversies at the heart of political debate. Though clearly a journalist with leftist sympathies, he displayed an all-too-rare willingness to acknowledge the contestability of his own perspective and the cogency of his opponents.

Public television will launch a weekly newsmagazine Jan. 18 with Bill Moyers as host and National Public Radio correspondents featured among its contributors. NOW With Bill Moyers will be produced by Moyers' Public Affairs Television production company and has a 50-week commitment, according to Pat Mitchell, president of PBS. The hourlong newsmagazine will air Fridays at 9 p.m. on most public television stations. The show's publicists describe NOW's format as a mixture of documentary reporting, one-on-one interviews and commentary.

Public television will launch a weekly newsmagazine Jan. 18 with Bill Moyers as host and National Public Radio correspondents featured among its contributors. NOW With Bill Moyers will be produced by Moyers' Public Affairs Television production company and has a 50-week commitment, according to Pat Mitchell, president of PBS. The hourlong newsmagazine will air Fridays at 9 p.m. on most public television stations. The show's publicists describe NOW's format as a mixture of documentary reporting, one-on-one interviews and commentary.

We need more television series like "Moyers/The Arab World," which premieres at 11 tonight on MPT (Channels 22 and 67).The five-part series, which runs through Friday, is a modest one by television production standards. Each half-hour show consists nothing more elaborate than Moyers and a handful of experts sitting in wingback chairs talking about Arab religion, culture, history and society.But what important talk it is. The conversation is filled with the kinds of information we so desperately need if we are ever going to start having informed opinions about the Middle East, instead of living on a roller coaster of emotions triggered by television pictures and political rhetoric.

Television hates death. Death makes people uncomfortable, and uncomfortable translates to tune-out in terms of viewers. That is reason enough for me to sing the praises of Bill Moyers and PBS for "On Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying," a brave and unblinking look at death and the politics of dying how and where we want. "Moyers on Dying" is uneven, too often marred by cliched visuals and a downright clunky editing style that fails to find a rhythm to some of the stories it is trying to tell.

Tea Leoni and "The Naked Truth" return, this time on NBC. Celebrate at your leisure."Friends" (8 p.m.-8: 30 p.m., WBAL, Channel 11) -- The degeneration of Rachel and Ross' relationship continues. Sob. NBC."Diagnosis Murder" (8 p.m.-9 p.m., WJZ, Channel 13) -- Dr. Sloan's mentor, who disappeared some three decades back, turns up inside a hospital wall. It's up to the Doc to find out what happened. CBS."Murder One" (9 p.m.-10 p.m., WMAR, Channel 2) -- Poor Rickey Latrell, the basketball star on trial for murder: Turns out he's not the saint his image makes him out to be, turns out his wife has her own skeleton in the closet, and it turns out his agent may, in fact, be the bad guy. Tough case.