Moyers on America
A Journalist and His Times
-
- $3.99
-
- $3.99
Publisher Description
The Peabody Award–winning journalist shares stories and insights into our country and the crises we face in an “eloquent selection of . . . commentaries” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Millions of Americans have invited Bill Moyers into their homes over the years. With television programs covering topics from American history, politics, and religion to the role of media and the world of ideas, he has become one of America’s most trusted journalists. Now Moyers presents, for the first time, a powerful statement of his own personal beliefs—political and moral. Combining illuminating forays into American history with candid comments on today’s politics, Moyers delivers perceptive and trenchant insights into the American experience.
From his early years as a Texas journalist to his role as a founding organizer of the Peace Corps, top assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent and analyst for CBS News, and producer of many of public television’s groundbreaking series, Moyers has been actively engaged in some of the most volatile episodes of the past fifty years. Drawing from these experiences, he shares his unique understanding of American politics and an enduring faith in the nation’s promise and potential. Whether reflecting on today’s media climate, corporate scandals, or religious and political upheavals, Moyers on America recovers the hopes of the past to establish their relevance for the present.
“Not only a good reporter . . . a first-rate storyteller.” —The Boston Globe
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I am a journalist but I am also a pilgrim," Moyers declares in this eloquent selection of his speeches and commentaries. Although these 20 pieces have been edited to resemble essays, their origin lends them a rousing urgency, as Moyers relates stories and insights in his personal journey from small-town Texas boyhood to eminent broadcast journalist. Whether he's extolling the virtues of participatory democracy based on the early 20th-century Progressive movement or lamenting recent evidence that democracy is on the auction block with politicians bought by special interests, Moyers's ability to communicate history, philosophy and personal experience simultaneously is impressive. His instinct for enlisting stories to get his message across appears throughout this collection, including tales from the years he worked for Lyndon Johnson (before and after Johnson became President). In a portrait of Johnson's political strengths and personal weaknesses, a less canny storyteller might leave out the telling anecdote about LBJ's integrating the Faculty Club of the University of Texas in 1964, but not Moyers. The same combination of candor, vividness and forthrightness animating his Johnson portrait is what gives such authority to Moyers's arguments that responsible journalism of unquestioned integrity is essential to our democratic process and that domination of news media by conglomerates, along with trends in celebrity-obsessed journalism, is undermining the freedom of the press. Moyers's wisdom, common sense and deeply felt principles should inspire and energize many readers in the very best way.
