The Los Angeles Times today published Neal Gabler’s thoughtful profile of Bill Moyers. From the article:
“Moyers has never been about now. He has always been about something beyond the moment. Or put another way, while everyone else in the media has been exploring topography, Moyers has been exploring geology.
“This belief in the efficacy of ideas in the service of good is also what has made him such an extraordinary interviewer. In a world of certainty that forecloses investigation, Moyers has curiosity. In a world of glibness and superficiality, he has a rare temerity of mind. In a world of ego and bombast, he has always been modest and self-effacing. He not only gives a forum to unusual thinkers, he is truly, visibly, interested in what they have to say and in who they are because he believes that their ideas really matter. It is clear that for Moyers, these interviews aren’t a way to fill time or amuse an audience or aggrandize himself, and he obviously has no interest in the “get” — the hot interview. Instead, they have always been a way to learn how, once again, to make things better by accumulating the wisdom of people who are trying to do just that — people who are engaging the world. In short, they are a search for moral prescriptions.
“None of this is the ordinary language of television, much less the ordinary purpose of television. In providing this kind of discourse, in taking ideas seriously, in understanding that discussion as opposed to declamation is itself a moral activity, and, perhaps above all, in fighting the power structure that so often ignores or defies the needs of ordinary people, Moyers has become much more than a broadcaster or even a moral thinker. He has become one of our preeminent moral authorities — the man on whom we rely to bring us back to our best values.”
Photograph of Bill Moyers by Peter Krogh of the Associated Press.
