If you do nothing else today, you must watch Bill Moyers’s fucking terrific
speech about the accusation of liberal bias made against his old PBS show
“Now” and the Public Broadcasting System by right-wing government creep Kenneth Tomlinson,
chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Moyers responded to the charge on Sunday
at the National Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis, recalling Nixon’s efforts to shut him up,
too.
“They’ve been after me for years now, and I suspect they will be stomping on my grave to
make sure I don’t come back from the dead,” he said. In the speech, entitled “We Were Getting it
Right, But Not Right Wing,” he went on to say:
Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control using the government
to threaten and intimidate; I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as
they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class to make sure Ahmad Chalabi winds up
controlling Iraq’s oil; I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into Karl Rove’s slush
fund; who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of
privilege and power picking their pockets; I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort
to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which
any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy. That’s who I mean.
If only Moyers wasn’t joking when he threatened to come out of retirement. In the meantime,
as Dear Leader’s appointee, Tomlinson is also going after NPR, about which
more later.
