Making His Move : After the ’92 Election, Bill Moyers Will Shift His Focus From Public TV

Bill Moyers is planning to launch a weekly series on PBS about issues facing the United States during the 1992 election year. But despite his enthusiasm for this new venture, Moyers intends to shift his focus away from public television thereafter. “1992 will be my last full year in public broadcasting,” he said in an interview.

By the end of next year, Moyers said, he will have spent most of the production funds he raised since he returned to PBS from CBS in 1986.

“I’m not going to disappear from public broadcasting,” he said, “but it’s not going to be the massive commitment that I have fulfilled in the last five years. Since I left CBS, I’ve raised about $15 million and done hundreds of hours of television. I’ve been very lucky through (corporations and foundations) to get the support for what I want to do, but I’m not eager to start over in raising an equal amount of money again. I’ll be 58 next year, believe it or not, and I think it’s time for younger people with bigger (fund-raising) cups.”

Moyers said that his decision to cut back at PBS was a personal one and that he had informed network executives. His public disclosure of it comes as PBS is planning to mark his 20th anniversary of starting in non-commercial television with a 90-minute special at 9 p.m. Friday, “Moyers: 20 Years of Listening to America.”

Moyers is working on several PBS specials for next year and on a five-part series about healing and the mind that will not air until early 1993. The election series, tentatively called “Listening to America” after a Moyers’ 1971 book, is expected to begin in April and continue through the November campaign.

“We will report on what ordinary Americans and others think about the issues facing us, and why so many Americans feel that they hate politics. This is how I started out on PBS, and it seems a good time to round out the circle.”

Moyers, whose career path has taken him from the Baptist ministry to working as an aide to President Lyndon Johnson to newspaper publishing before turning to television, is still contemplating what he will do beyond 1992.

Despite recent suggestions by political columnists that he might be drafted as a Democratic candidate, Moyers said that he is not planning to run for President, and he could not do so now that he is committed to the series.

According to published accounts of recent presidential campaigns, Moyers has been approached several times in the past to run for the nation’s highest office. This summer, he said, “A group came to me and said they wanted to draft me, that I wouldn’t have to do anything, and they’d run a campaign to build up the fires. I told them absolutely not.”

Doesn’t he want to be President?

“Sure, I’d like to be President--everybody in this (restaurant) would like to be President. Most Americans believe that anybody can grow up to be President, and we’ve proved that lately. Anyone can grow up to be President, and that’s part of what’s wrong with this country. But do I intend to run for President? No. I want to stay a journalist.”

Moyers said that, like business leaders Peter Ueberroth and Lee Iacocca, others whose names pop up occasionally as potential candidates, “I’m seen as somebody outside who’s not a political animal, whom a lot of people read into what they want to read into. Nobody knows what Ueberroth or Iacocca think about abortion or the debt. . . . Television makes people intimate strangers. People stop me on the street and want to tell me their stories, make a connection. Television does that. I remember when Walter Cronkite got a vote for vice president at one of the conventions. As he said subsequently, ‘The moment I announce my position on abortion or the Panama Canal, boom, they’re out the door.’ ”

Unlike Ueberroth and Iacocca, however, Moyers, in addition to producing numerous conventional documentaries, has not hesitated to state his point of view in TV essays on PBS, such as one award-winner on Watergate, and in an earlier stint as a commentator on CBS.

“I guess I’m perceived as being liberal,” he said, “because I’ve asked a lot of tough questions about the only administration that we’ve had for the past 12 years, which has been a Republican administration. Personally, I’ve got a traditional family, I’m a regular worshiper in my religion, I’m a pretty square guy. Do I believe that society has to act to solve its problems? Yeah, I do. But is that the reason I do television? No. There was no ideological impulse to doing (mythologist) Joseph Campbell or (historian) Barbara Tuchman.”

Moyers has been praised so lavishly--not simply winning awards for his work as a TV journalist and commentator but also being hailed by some observers as the conscience of America--that he probably was due for some bashing by critics. Against the backdrop of his name being floated as a presidential candidate, the New Republic, an opinion magazine, in August published a controversial essay by Andrew Ferguson, a conservative editorial writer for the Scripps-Howard News Service, attacking Moyers for everything from a “descent into pop spiritualism” to having his wife, Judith, serve as president of his production company to authorizing the infamous “daisy” commercial in the 1964 presidential campaign that linked Republican candidate Barry Goldwater to nuclear war.

When the New Republic refused to print in full Moyers’ lengthy response to the article, he took out a two-page ad in the magazine that carried his point-by-point rebuttal. Newsweek last week criticized the reporting methods in the New Republic article and branded it a “vicious, innuendo-filled” attack from the right wing.

“Our tradition is to allow writers to state their opinion,” Andrew Sullivan, editor of the New Republic, said Monday. “We stand by the article, and we’re glad to have been one of the few places that has been willing to criticize Moyers, who had been rumored to be a presidential candidate.”

Some of Moyers’ fans wondered whether he, as a public figure, was being too sensitive to the criticism.

“I am thin-skinned about wrongful attacks,” Moyers said. “What I have going for me is my credibility as a journalist, and they tried to go after my credibility by using lies and innuendos. A lot of my friends told me not to respond, but I am not going to sit back and let the right wing--or the left wing--go unanswered.”

As for his future, Moyers said that he has thought about writing a book on the Johnson years, and he did not rule out more television.

“There might be some big idea--like Kenneth Clark’s ‘Civilisation,’ but maybe looking forward into this country’s future--that could come up and take many years to do,” Moyers said reflectively. “I would just like to frame this 20 years and think about what I’m going to do next. I honestly don’t know what that will be.”

Moyers expressed optimism about public television’s future. “PBS is getting squeezed from all sides financially,” he said, “but I think it’s here to stay because it has a niche.”

At a time when cable networks are nibbling at PBS’ cultural franchise, Moyers argued, public affairs is a strong source of programming for maintaining the network’s identity.

“I think PBS has to find a different mission from what it’s had the last 10 or 15 years,” he said. “I hope it goes for education in the broadest sense of that word and doesn’t try to compete with high-brow comedy or high-brow entertainment. I don’t think we can be the Disney Channel or A&E; or HBO. I think our concerns should be the people who take seriously the life of this republic. That means public affairs and educational programs--not instructional programs, although we have a role there, too, in the daytime--but educational programs in prime time that are well done.”