Moyers to Do Commentary on ‘NBC Nightly News’ : Television: He will continue to be associated with PBS but with fewer projects. It’s been nearly a decade since he left CBS as a commentator.

Bill Moyers will bring back the role of network nightly news commentator with NBC, he said Tuesday, almost a decade after leaving the same role at CBS for more freedom at the Public Broadcasting Service.

Moyers’ new post on “NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw” comes at a time when PBS has fallen under the cross hairs of Republican budget-cutters on Capitol Hill.

But Moyers said there was no connection between PBS’ budget battles and his decision to join NBC News. He will continue to produce programs for public television through his independent company.

“I am still high on PBS,” said Moyers, whose award-winning PBS programs include “Healing the Mind,” “Listening to America” and “World of Ideas.” “PBS serves a purpose in this country that I don’t think anyone else does. My agreement (with NBC News) provides that I can continue to do for PBS such things that I’ve done in the past. But I was planning to moderate my productivity at PBS anyway, as the result of a lot of circumstances.”

Those circumstances include recent heart bypass surgery and the desire of his wife, who runs his production company, to write a book. Moyers, 60, has produced 250 hours of public broadcasting in the last seven years.

When Andrew Lack was hired as president of NBC News in 1993, one of his first acts was to call Moyers, for whom he had worked as a producer at CBS. NBC commentator John Chancellor was about to retire and Lack did not want to lose the dying breed of network commentators.

“I would have done this sooner except I had heart bypass surgery last May,” Moyers said, “then I had to finish a four-part series on violence (“What Can We Do About Violence?”) that just aired. Andy and I agreed as soon as that was aired we would announce this.”

Moyers will deliver his first commentary this month. He will do two to three of them a week, depending upon the news, lasting no longer than one minute and 45 seconds each.

He will not appear on set with Brokaw. Instead, his essays, as Moyers calls them, will be taped.

“I prefer to tape. I’m not as good in the live circumstance as Tom and the others are. That comes from in part being a documentarian for so long, and in part being schooled in theology, where you know what you want to say before you say it, because you might send somebody to hell,” said Moyers, who was ordained in his 20s as a Baptist minister.

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Although Moyers has a reputation as a liberal--he was an aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson--he said he does not have an agenda at NBC.

“The attraction of this is trying to help people make sense of all the creatures who pop out of the holes and disappear into the night before you get a full look at them,” he said. “What the night brings is what I’ll talk about.”

Lack bristled when asked if NBC intended to hire anyone specifically to balance Moyers’ point of view.

“No,” Lack responded. “These labels, if I may say gently but firmly, are a little silly to my way of thinking. But we have at NBC (others) who meet the acid test of those who want to hunt for labels. We have Republican speech writers who are on NBC’s air. We have a great diversity of thought here. Bill is a great reporter and a great journalist who has been honored by our profession probably more than any single journalist we can point to today. He (received) all those awards for being the essence of fairness.”

In recent years, Moyers has had four or five documentary series in various stages of development at PBS. From now on, he said, he will only work on one at a time.

Moyers worked as a commentator and correspondent for CBS from 1976 to 1978, and then again from 1981 to 1986. “I have a record of going back and forth because I always wanted to go where I can do what is important to me at the moment,” he explained. “There are stages of a man’s life.”