Bill Moyers was one of the chief inheritors of the Edward R. Murrow tradition of "deep-think" journalism. Working alternately on CBS and PBS in the 1970s and early 1980s, and then almost exclusively on PBS. His achievements were principally in the areas of investigative documentary and long-form conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers. Moyers, who had been a print journalist, ordained Baptist minister, press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson, and newspaper publisher before coming to television in 1970, gained public and private foundation support for producing some of television's most incisive investigative documentaries. Each was delivered in the elegantly written and deceptively soft-spoken narrations that came, Moyers later said, out of the story-telling traditions of his East Texas upbringing. Where Edward R. Murrow had taken on Joseph McCarthy on See It Now and the agri-business industry in his famous Harvest of Shame documentary, Moyers examined the failings of constitutional democracy in his 1974 Essay on Watergate and exposed governmental illegalities and cover-up during the Iran Contra scandal. He looked at issues of race, class and gender, at the power media images held for a nation of "consumers," not citizens, and explored virtually every aspect of American political, economic and social life in his documentaries.
Courtesy of The Museum of Broadcast Communications Website