Bill Moyers on His Legendary Journalism Career: "Democracy Should Be a Brake on Unbridled Greed and Power"

In a Democracy Now! special broadcast, we are joined by legendary journalist Bill Moyers, a founding organizer of the Peace Corps, press secretary for President Lyndon Johnson, a publisher of Newsday, and senior correspondent for CBS News. Public television is where he has made his home, producing many groundbreaking shows and winning more than 30 Emmy Awards. Moyers has just published a new book, "Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues," a collection of interviews from his popular PBS show that aired from 2007 to 2010. "The greatest thing in politics in my time is the transformation of democracy from a citizens society—all that moral agency of all those people in the civil rights movement who stood up against the weight or authority and acted as agents of change—to a consumer society, where most of us are caught up on that treadmill, trying to get more," Moyers says. In a wide-ranging interview, he also discusses the state of the public media infrastructure he helped to establish as part of the Johnson administration. "Public broadcasting, which is a place that treats you a s a citizen instead of a consumer is threatened. We must defend it, we must call it back to its heights. Otherwise we are totally at the mercy of corporate power."

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Source: Democracy Now!