Bill Moyers Holds a Mirror Up to America : The veteran journalist airs his views on tabloid TV, celebrity journalism and dramatic reenactments

In nearly 20 years as a broadcast journalist, Bill Moyers has used TV to explore a variety of subjects, from the signing of the Constitution to the impact of teen pregnancy on the traditional black family. In “The Public Mind,” a new four-part series on PBS, Moyers uses TV to examine the media air that we breathe--a world saturated with powerful visual images that mix fact and fiction to shape public opinion.

“We’re in unmapped territory,” he says, “where the image is the dominant grammar of our public conversation, and we’re not even sure how to think about it.”

The first program, which looked at advertising, debuted Wednesday. Subsequent episodes, examining the role of images in politics, business and the news media, will be seen Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15 and at 8 p.m. on Channel 58.

An unusual combination of reporter, preacher and teacher in his TV documentaries, Moyers has moved back and forth between the air-time constraints of commercial TV and the budget constraints of PBS. His 1988 series, “Joseph Campbell and the Power of the Myth,” was a surprise hit on public television, where some stations initially opposed the show as old-fashioned “talking heads.”

In the three years since he resigned as a CBS correspondent and commentator, TV news has changed dramatically with the spread of tabloid TV, celebrity reporters and dramatic reenactments. Noting that he did not want his new series to be seen simply as an attack on TV news, Moyers was initially reluctant to comment on the state of the media when he sat down for an interview. But once he began speaking as a citizen as well as a journalist, he expressed his passionately held views with angry eloquence.

Question: What prompted you to do this series?

Answer: If you travel around the country, as I do, you hear people everywhere saying, “If we’re so prosperous, why do I feel so bad?” Or, “If things are so good, why do I worry?” It’s becoming harder and harder in America to distinguish between what is real and what is fictionalized. There’s a vague sense of unease in the country, a suspicion that democratic politics--choosing our leaders--no longer controls the nation’s destiny. Voter participation in 1988 was the second lowest in the 20th Century and, in the non-Southern states, where three-fourths of all Americans live, the turnout rate was the lowest in 164 years.

Q: What’s the connection between the news media and the state of politics today?

A: Political discourse is being reduced to fortune cookie politics and bumper sticker journalism, with little accountability. The combination of TV and politics is designed to make us feel good, to forget reality. We Americans are great consumers, but we’re also citizens. In politics today, we’re being treated as consumers only, not citizens. That may please us temporarily, but we don’t like being deceived.

Q: What’s wrong with feel-good imagery in campaigns?

A: We’re not getting discussion of the serious issues that face us. People are asking, “Why is it that I don’t get what I vote for?” Lyndon Johnson campaigned on peace and gave us war. Jimmy Carter promised competence in government and turned out to be inept in power. Ronald Reagan promised a balanced budget and gave us the largest debt in our history. George Bush’s theme song was “Don’t worry, be happy”--and, having campaigned on flags and furloughs, he has been denied a mandate to sort out our priorities. Is Willie Horton (the convict who was the subject of Bush’s controversial negative ad against Michael Dukakis) more important than the deficit? He must be, because that’s all we paid attention to in the campaign. On the day after the election, the General Accounting Office published a series of reports on the major issues facing this country. None of them was seriously discussed in the campaign. Nobody I know is happy with this system, from voters to the politicians themselves.

Q: When you were an aide to Lyndon Johnson, did you approve the infamous “daisy” commercial? (The political ad in 1964 showed a girl pulling petals from a daisy, with a nuclear countdown in the background. The ad, which seemed to imply that President Johnson’s Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, was a war monger, was aired only once before being dropped after a public outcry.):

A: Yes I did, and I regret that we were in on the first wave of the future. The ad was intended to remind voters of Johnson’s prudence; it wasn’t meant to make you think Barry Goldwater was a war monger--but that’s how a lot of people interpreted it. If my memory serves me correctly, we never touched on Vietnam in any of the political spots. It haunts me all this time that Johnson was portrayed as the peacemaker in that campaign, but he committed the country to a long, bloody war in Vietnam.

Q: In your program about news, you interview CBS White House correspondent Lesley Stahl, who says that, without her knowledge, Reagan’s advisers worked with her producers to set up pleasing pictures of Reagan that would make the evening news. How could that happen?

A: There’s a new generation in TV who are driven by the lust for picture.

Q: But hasn’t TV always been driven by visuals?

A: It wasn’t always so. What Eric Sevareid said was every bit as important as any picture.

Q: You’re not against pictures, are you?

A: No, of course not. Some pictures are news, and the visual image can give us a picture of reality. But journalists are supposed to gather, weigh, organize and evaluate information--not just put on pictures.

There’s a subtle change that is going on in the role of the editor. Editors traditionally get up in the morning and say, “What’s going on that people need to know about?”--some of it is what do they want to know about--but what do they need to know about too. When the advertising ethic takes over, and news becomes that which sells, you’re not thinking about what people need to know--you’re thinking about what it will take to sell them.

Q: Are you saying we should have (arms-control expert) Paul Nitze on TV and in magazines instead of Madonna?

A: Obviously, Madonna is a figure of enormous curiosity, but if people who want to be informed about arms control have no access to Paul Nitze in the mass media because it’s all about Madonna, then we won’t be able to make informed judgments about arms control.

Q: When you have re-creations on programs like CBS News’ “Saturday Night with Connie Chung,” what is being lost?

A: The distinction between what is real and what isn’t. If Abbie Hoffman (the subject of a dramatization on the Chung program) didn’t say it, he didn’t say it. It’s all right for the artist to create a fiction to convey a truth--but news either happened or it didn’t. I thought the first dramatization on “Connie Chung” (about an early civil rights leader) was brilliantly done. But why not put it on under the aegis of CBS Entertainment? When you mix fiction and news, you diminish the distinction between truth and fiction, and you wear down the audience’s own discriminating power to judge if that was so or not so. It’s not just the networks who are doing this--it’s all the other production centers.

Q: But network news executives might say, “What do you know? We’re giving people what they want with re-creations.”

A: Then get out of the news business altogether. Turn it all over to entertainment. But don’t fly the flag of journalism to hide the consumer fraud you’re perpetrating. Don’t corrupt journalism in the name of journalism. Just put a pillow over its head and put it out of its misery.

Q: How is it that entertainment values seem to have grown in network news over the past few years?

A: It’s happened in part because you no longer have the Bill Paleys (the longtime chairman of CBS), who, with their sense of stewardship, would protect the news division as a part of an organization whose main resources came from entertainment. But a lot of this has come from within, not from the top down. Network journalism has been destroyed from within, by producers and journalists who had no principle more important than satisfying their own ambition. They’ve created shows that succeed neither as entertainment nor journalism, and they’ve been willing to subvert journalism in the mistaken notion that nobody would notice.

But the American people are more discriminating than that. It’s precisely that significant portion of Americans who’ve opted out of voting, who’ve opted out of watching commercial TV, who feel betrayed.

Q: You sound angry.

A: This is not a personal complaint. But part of me is angry over what commercial broadcasting is doing to reporting in general and journalists in particular. We are systematically being robbed of our credibility. Talented network journalists are paid enormous sums of money--but assigned trivial pursuits. Tabloid TV shows are polluting journalistic standards by hiring celebrities as “reporters.” What happens to the basic standards of journalism when they are abandoned for the “celebrity” appeal of imposters? I remember when Phyllis George was hired to be the anchor on the “CBS Morning News,” three young female researchers stopped me in the hall to ask whether this meant that if they wanted to be on-air journalists, they should forgo years of work and try out for Miss America instead.

Q: Why did you leave CBS?

A: There was less and less encouragement and fewer and fewer opportunities to do the traditional journalism that I think informs the public mind--not the whole public mind but those people who do act upon the information and news that they receive. That became increasingly difficult to accomplish.

Q: Would the people who watch you on PBS be available to watch you on a commercial network, Friday night at 9?

A: I can’t answer that question. I’m satisfied that I’m reaching a large and concerned audience--and not just an audience of elites. There seem to be a lot of young men and women out there, for example, who found something in the Joseph Campbell series. I’ve done 70 hours of television in the past three years, and I’m reaching a satisfying audience. I’m happy in what I’m doing.

Q: Some of your critics at the networks say that you expect too much of commercial television, that you think your kind of television is the only way.

A: I don’t want to set myself up as the measure of TV news. We were very careful in this series not to make judgments but to say simply that we’re in unmapped territory with this constant barrage of images from mass culture.

I am concerned as an American citizen about what’s happening to my political culture. I’ve got three kids who are going to live well into the 21st Century. I’m not; I’m 55 years old--I could go tomorrow. I need no more air time, I need no more money. I’m saying that, as I look around, I believe that our ability to continue as a nation, to protect those things that we value most, depends upon our ability to pick from the alternatives that face us.

If we continue to live in a never-never land of feeling good, if we conduct our campaigns and never address the issues, if every message that comes to us has a hidden message of selling us something, if we try to govern ourselves by the pleasure principle, this 200-year-old experiment is finished.

The astonishing thing to me is that network executives are all citizens themselves. So what if you make all the money you can make in television, but you have no public parks in which to take a stroll on Sunday afternoon? What does it matter what your Nielsen rating is if the roof is falling in on this country? I must confess to you that I don’t understand it.

The mass media in this country are more immune to criticism than any other institution I’ve ever seen. The truth of the matter is, the networks are finished as enlightened forces in public opinion. The mass media in this country are like the band on the Titanic. They’re playing for the passengers to dance while the ship hits the iceberg. A lot of people are going to get rich before the collision, but they’re finished as players in the democratic culture. People will turn to alternative sources of information, whether it’s video technology or small magazines.

I’m worried now that I’m sounding like a scold--I don’t mean to. But I’m saddened by what’s happened to broadcast journalism.

If the world is made in the image of young TV executives, are they going to feel as good as God (did) about it? Are they going to say, “This is good”? What astonishes me is their inability to perceive the power of the medium that is in their hands. TV is the most marvelous medium for creativity that I’ve ever seen. Images can inspire as well as dull, inform as well as deceive. Why does television fail to go for the one sure ground that’s going to produce, in time, the returns that will be given it by an informed public?

ON THE MEDIA

Obviously, Madonna is a figure of enormous curiosity, but if people who want to be informed about arms control have no access to Paul Nitze in the mass media because it’s all about Madonna, then we won’t be able to make informed judgments about arms control.

On Celeb Journalists

What happens to the basic standards of journalism when they are abandoned for the “celebrity” appeal of imposters? I remember when Phyllis George was hired to be the anchor on the “CBS Morning News,” three young female researchers stopped me in the hall to ask whether this meant that if they wanted to be on-air journalists, they should forego years of work and try out for Miss America instead.

On Network Journalism

You no longer have the Bill Paleys (the longtime chairman of CBS), who, with their sense of stewardship, would protect the news division as a part of an organization whose main resources came from entertainment. . . . Network journalism has been destroyed from within, by producers and journalists who had no principle more important than satisfying their own ambition.