What a loss: Bill Moyers to Leave PBS

Bill Moyers to Leave PBS
Feb 19, 12:16 PM (ET)
By FRAZIER MOORE

NEW YORK (AP) - Bill Moyers, whose weekly magazine "Now" on PBS has capped a 30-year career in TV journalism, is leaving the broadcast after the November elections.

His next venture: Writing a long-proposed book about Lyndon Johnson, whom he served before and during Johnson's presidency.

"It isn't because I feel old," Moyers, 69, told The Associated Press of his decision, which he made official Thursday. "It's because I feel compelled to do something else now, that only I can do - which is that book."

The veteran journalist said he had pondered the new course for some time, and originally considered stepping down in June, when he turns 70. Instead, he will scale back his duties after that, but stay on through the presidential race.

Moyers has been host of the program as well as an executive editor and frequent reporter since its premiere in January 2002.

Like most PBS programming, "Now" is funded on an annual basis, but network president Pat Mitchell voiced hope the series will carry on in Moyers' absence.

"I have a deep commitment to the program," she said.

Airing Friday nights at 8:30 p.m. EST on most PBS stations, "Now" is a diverse mix of reports and in-studio interviews whose aim, in Moyers' words, "is to tell stories nobody else is telling and put on people who have no forum elsewhere."

Among those stories other news shows have routinely dismissed: the threat of media consolidation, which "Now" has covered steadily.

The weekly audience for "Now with Bill Moyers" averages 2.6 million viewers.

When Moyers steps down, it will end more than 30 years' almost continuous presence on TV in news and public affairs, beginning on PBS in the early 1970s with "Bill Moyers' Journal." Then, during a decade at CBS News, he was a commentator and chief correspondent for "CBS Reports."

Before he began "Now" with his wife, Judith Davidson Moyers, the couple spent 15 years making long-form documentaries for PBS on such wide-ranging subjects as campaign corruption, the power of myth, drug addiction and modern dance.

Among his honors are multiple Emmy, Peabody and Alfred I. du Pont-Columbia University awards.

"Now," and Moyers' involvement in it, was an outgrowth of the terrorist attacks.

"I wanted to do something after Sept. 11 that made me feel useful and pertinent," he once explained. Returning to quick-response journalism after concentrating on long-form, long-in-the-making documentaries, Moyers conducted two weeks of nightly on-air conversations examining the tragedy.

Within months after that, he accepted PBS' invitation to start "Now," where his "deep-think" brand of journalism could continue on a frequent basis.

Even after "Now," Mitchell said Moyers would be welcome back on PBS.

"I have made it clear to him he's not leaving public television," she said.

But for the foreseeable future, Moyers will focus on his Johnson book, and hopes to complete a draft by the end of 2005.

"It won't be a history or even a memoir," he said. "It will be a series of reflections" on the Kennedy-Johnson era.

A native of Oklahoma who grew up in Texas, Moyers first worked for Johnson in 1954, as a 20-year-old assistant who helped with correspondence for the new Senate Majority Leader.

He served Johnson in various other capacities through the years. Though by 1963 he was deputy director of the Peace Corps, on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Moyers was in Austin helping with the presidential trip. He flew back to Washington on Air Force One with newly sworn-in President Johnson, for whom he performed various jobs, including press secretary, through 1967. He then became publisher of Newsday.

"I was with (Johnson) for a small portion of his long public career, and only half of his presidency," Moyers said, "but there was a period of time we really bonded. He used me as a sounding board. We were very close."
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