We Won't See His Like Again

They said that about Edward R. Murrow 45 years ago, when Bill Moyers was still LBJ's press secretary. Yet less than a decade later Moyers had taken up Murrow's mantle with Bill Moyers' Journal. The last broadcast was Friday night. I don't see a replacement anywhere on the horizon, but I hope I'm wrong.

Eric Alterman eulogizes Moyers career in The Nation:

Nearly twenty years ago, I spoke to Edward R. Murrow's top producer, Fred Friendly, who told me he thought of Bill Moyers as "the Murrow of our time...the broadcaster who most upholds his mantle." But while Murrow remains television journalism's most admired historical figure, it's all but inarguable that Moyers long ago surpassed his achievements.

SNIP

If I were forced to name a single broadcast emblematic of what Bill Moyers brought to our national conversation--and what we stand to lose with his April 30 retirement from regular broadcasting--it would be his amazing 1986 CBS documentary The Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black America. Taking on so sensitive a topic--one that had remained taboo in public discussion since the furious leftist attacks on the now infamous 1965 Moynihan Report had traumatized Pat Moynihan and nearly destroyed his career--Moyers waded into waters no one else wished to enter. Confronting a problem that had metastasized after two decades of liberal silence in the face of a relentless right-wing war on the poor, Moyers walked into the ghetto to give its residents the chance to speak for themselves.

The program was remarkable in what it did not contain. It had no "responsible" black political voices explaining away the problem of fatherless children, no white liberals offering excuses, no conservative condemnation and no experts framing the issue with sociological theory. It was just one struggling teenage single mom after another, along with more than a few absent fathers, trying to explain how they coped and why they had made the choices they had. In an age before cable, the Internet or much talk-radio, its impact was explosive, comparable, perhaps, to Murrow's famous 1960 "Harvest of Shame" report on migrant farmworkers. (Ironically, both men did their best work at the network with one foot out the door.) Like Murrow, Moyers deployed television's unmatched power to focus attention on the voiceless, forcing Americans to confront the humanity of those who are usually demonized or ignored. As even a conservative New York Times reviewer noted at the time, the program's "intelligence and grace...redeems television journalism."

In choosing PBS over CBS, Moyers opted for independence over influence. This freedom has allowed him to earn a deserved reputation for being the last unapologetic liberal anywhere in broadcast television. But his most significant legacy is that, also like Murrow, he treated his audience as adult citizens of a republic, who bear collective responsibility for the society we share. The notion that television can both entertain and educate--even to the point where it challenges our most powerful ideas and institutions--was crucial to the medium's founders. Yet it has all but disappeared in our current political culture, together with the democratic self-confidence necessary to sustain it. For the better part of forty years, Moyers and his co-workers have demonstrated, time and again, just what such self-confidence looks like. In doing so, they've shown the rest of us how rare and valuable this resource has become.

Read the whole thing.