Bill Moyers: Hypocrite Extraordinaire

Bill Moyers is the featured speaker on today's agenda of the "Take Back America" Conference. His planned remarks are billed as "Public Affairs Television: The Historic Stakes/Historic Struggle."

Without question, Moyers is a darling of the left. This is how Bernard Timberg describes him for the Museum of Broadcast Communications:

Bill Moyers was one of the chief inheritors of the Edward R. Murrow tradition of "deep-think" journalism.

...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.

...By the early 1990s Bill Moyers had established himself as a significant figure of television talk, his power and influence providing him access to corridors of power and policy...Bill Moyers had by this time become one of the few broadcast journalists who might be said to approach the stature of Edward R. Murrow. If Murrow had founded broadcast journalism, Moyers had significantly extended its traditions.

By putting Moyers in the same league as Murrow, Timberg elevates him to a larger than life status. Moyers is considered to be a god among the mainstream media elite.

I'm left to wonder if this adoring crowd is ignorant or simply excusing some less flattering aspects of Moyers' accomplishments.

Before going into journalism, Bill Moyers was a memeber of President Lyndon B. Johnson's staff. As a special assistant to the president, he was a principal architect of Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign.

One would expect that Moyers, supposedly being a man of flawless character, would run a campaign beyond reproach on matters of integrity.

Not so.

From the transcript of a segment on Rush Limbaugh's June 2, 2005 broadcast:

"The Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Book Two, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate Together with Additional Supplemental and Separate Views." April 26th, 1976. Here's the relevant excerpt: "Under the Johnson administration, the FBI was used to gather and report political intelligence on the administration's partisan opponents in the last days of the '64 and '68 presidential election campaigns. In the closing days of the '64 campaign, presidential aide Bill Moyers asked the FBI to conduct name checks on all persons employed in Senator Goldwater's Senate office and information on two staff members was reported to the White House."

.... I have a story here from the July 6, 1998 issue of National Review, a story by Lee Edwards, and let me just give you the relevant excerpt of this piece. It's seven pages long, but I have the relevant excerpt here. "Although Goldwater was invariably described by the media as an extremist, the extremist tone of the 1964 campaign was set not by the Republican challenger but by the Democratic incumbent. And everyone in the Democratic campaign organization got the message: Anything goes. Which is why the White House did not hesitate to use the Central Intelligence Agency illegally to obtain information about the Goldwater campaign. E. Howard Hunt, later convicted for taking part in the Watergate break-in, was then serving as chief of covert action for the CIA's Domestic Operations Division. He told a congressional committee a decade later that he was ordered to spy on Goldwater's headquarters in the fall of 1964. When Hunt, who knew full well that the senator could not be classified as a domestic enemy,' expressed reluctance to carry out the assignment, he was told that President Johnson himself had ordered this activity.' By the middle of September, Goldwater's regional directors were convinced that the telephones at the Republican national offices were bugged. The offices were periodically swept for listening devices, but important information kept leaking to the Democrats. The directors became so spooked that they began making their confidential calls from outside pay telephones. Far more disturbing was the FBI's illegal bugging of the Goldwater campaign plane, where the senator and his top aides often made crucial decisions. The bureau's illegal surveillance was discovered by Robert Mardian several years later, when he was assistant attorney general for the Internal Security Division in the first Nixon Administration."

Moyers, the principle architect of Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign, used the FBI to run name checks on members of Goldwater's staff.

One more time...

"Under the Johnson administration, the FBI was used to gather and report political intelligence on the administration's partisan opponents in the last days of the '64 and '68 presidential election campaigns. In the closing days of the '64 campaign, presidential aide Bill Moyers asked the FBI to conduct name checks on all persons employed in Senator Goldwater's Senate office and information on two staff members was reported to the White House."

Timberg inaccurately cites 1974 as the year Moyers' Essay on Watergate was broadcast. In fact, October 21, 1973 was the day it aired. In it, Moyers detailed how the Nixon White House was shredding democracy.

Quite hypocritical, considering that Moyers himself had the FBI gather intelligence on staff members of President Johnson's opponent. The campaign Moyers takes credit for masterminding used the CIA to bug the Republican national offices. The FBI illegally bugged Goldwater's campaign plane.

Not quite hypocritical--VERY hypocritical.

Moyers had no problem shredding democracy for Johnson; yet he turns around to condemn the Nixon White House for basically doing what he did. Moyers still feasts on the accolades the liberal media showered on him for his part in battling Nixon.

It makes sense that Hypocrite Moyers is at the forefront of the charge attacking Ken Timlinson for trying to bring balance to PBS, and rid it of its liberal bias.

Moyers is not a man of integrity.