A Hint of Fall on the Airwaves : Bill Moyers’ New ‘World of Ideas’ Debuts on Monday

In the fall of 1986, Bill Moyers, after thinking things over, quit CBS News. If he ever wants to return, his boss said then, quoting a Welsh saying, “We’ll keep a welcome in the hillside.”

That boss, Howard Stringer, now heads the CBS Broadcast Group. David Burke, a former ABC News executive, now heads CBS News. But Moyers remains in the hillside of public TV, professing no thoughts of a return to CBS.

His thoughts currently are of a new PBS effort bowing Monday, “Bill Moyers’ World of Ideas,” a series of 50 half-hour discussions with writers, artists, historians and philosophers on various issues facing the nation today. (It will air weeknights at 11 on Channels 28 and 24.)

The lead-off witness, who has a return engagement Friday: David Puttnam, the British film maker ousted last year as head of Columbia Pictures after a brief but vigorous joust with Hollywood’s Establishment.

The Puttnam interview is indeed thoughtful and philosophical. But why a movie-maker for the opener?

“Idiosyncratic reasons,” Moyers said. Today’s politics, he said, “is entertainment, and films are the image-makers of our day.” He ticked off instances of how Washington has become what he calls “Hollywood East.”

At the Democratic convention, he noted, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, the party’s standard-bearer, was introduced by his cousin, Olympia, “whose knowledge of politics is zilch, but who is known to the public as the woman who won the Academy Award for her performance in ‘Moonstruck.’ ”

Then at the Republican convention, Vice President George Bush made two “Dirty Harry” references in his acceptance speech, he said, and Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle, Bush’s running mate, “led off his speech talking about ‘Hoosiers,’ which Ronald Reagan saw at least three times.”

With that sort of thing commonplace now, plus the fact that foreigners often have the best insights about America, Puttnam seemed a good choice for an interview, Moyers said.

“If you want to think about American politics differently but realistically,” he said, “you have to think about how images get made and what Hollywood is doing to those images.”

The others in the series’ first week are decidedly not part of the Hollywood ramble. They are environmentalist Jessica Tuchman Mathews, ethicist Michael Josephson and historian Henry Steele Commager.

Although the series is airing during the presidential election race, it doesn’t touch on the campaign. Rather, Moyers said, it is intended as a gentle parallel of sorts to issues that may be discussed in the race.

“I’m staying away from the election process itself,” said Moyers, 54, a top aide to the late Lyndon B. Johnson when the latter was a U.S. senator and then his press secretary--until 1967--when the Texas Democrat was President.

“What I’m trying to do is simply give people an insight into those deeper values and beliefs that always come to bear on a presidential election, but often unconsciously.”

Moyers said he feels that “our political rhetoric has distanced itself from reality.” However, he’s unsure whether it’s the fault of the candidates or the news media covering the candidates.

“But the pressure to obfuscate, to trivialize, to minimize and avoid the life-and-death ethical, moral, legal and medical issues we face . . . is costing us greatly in terms of our ability to function as a society.

“So I thought, modestly, we would attempt to put people up there who’ve been thinking about these matters all their lives, but are never really consulted about television when it comes to talking about the issues.”

Moyers will be dealing in a separate 90-minute program with what has become a double-bill issue with the advent of television: the history of presidential politics and the growth of the media. Co-produced with London’s Channel 4, that program, “The Prime Time Presidency,” is scheduled to air Oct. 3 on KCET Channel 28 in Los Angeles. It will have two versions--one for the British, one for Americans.

After the White House and three years as publisher of Newsday, Moyers took the plunge into TV--the public kind at first, then CBS, with one year spent as a contributing editor of Newsweek magazine.

Feeling as passionately as he does about ideas, issues and society, why didn’t he ever enter politics?

“When I was a young man, I wanted to be governor of Texas,” Moyers said. “But I’ve never had any political ambitions beyond that. And I’ve just instinctively been drawn to journalism.

“I used to stand there, answering questions at White House briefings, lighting my cigar and thinking, ‘Moyers, you’re an idiot. Why aren’t you on the other side, asking questions instead of being on this side answering them?’

“And I also think that there is no role more important in our society than that of the practitioner of television who uses it to try to address some of the issues of democracy.”

It is said that in this age of TV-channel “zappers,” with access to scores of cable TV channels, that TV has lost the very power of which he speaks.

“It’s lost it in the sense of the mass audience,” Moyers said. “It has not lost it in the sense of the constituencies of America. You have to find your audience in America today. It isn’t just sitting there in that once-great mass stadium.”

In a sense, he said, the new era in TV “has diminished the power of the networks. But it’s increased the power of the minor leagues, so to speak.”

Moyers’ current tour at PBS, his third, began when his second stint at CBS News as a commentator and documentary reporter ended in November, 1986.

His move ended weeks of agonizing over whether to remain at an organization that in the preceding three years had been sorely beset by low morale and public fights over its course. In a Newsweek piece published two months before he left CBS and shortly before a top-level shakeup led to the ouster of then-CBS News chief Van Gordon Sauter, Moyers accused the news division’s management of “yielding to the encroachment of entertainment values” in trying to get ratings.

Many thought he’d stay after the shakeup, which put two executives who admired his work in charge: Howard Stringer as boss of CBS News and Lawrence Tisch as president of CBS Inc. They wanted him to stay. But Moyers left and launched a series of PBS programs produced by his Public Affairs Television Inc. and backed by $10 million in grants he had raised.

What does he think of CBS News and its work, now that the turmoil and low morale that spawned at least two major books about it are largely over?

“I don’t have an opinion on that,” he said. “I have been so busy producing my own work I haven’t been able to watch anybody else’s.”

He is somewhat coy about saying whether he might ever return to one of the commercial networks, even on a part-time basis.

“I haven’t had any thoughts (about that) because I haven’t had any time,” he said.

“By Election Day I will have done 60 hours in (public) television in two years. That’s more public affairs programming than most of the networks do themselves. . . . I haven’t had time to think on what happens when the money’s gone.”

All Moyers will say about his future is this: “I’m going to do television that I think is important wherever I can find the outlet for it.”