Holding feet to the fire from his pulpit at PBS

Judging from the way the Bush political machine has allowed only people who sign affidavits of support to attend his campaign events, it seems unlikely that George W. Bush would ever subject himself to being interrogated by Bill Moyers, one of his most persistent and persuasive critics. But if the unthinkable happened, what would the host of PBS’ “Now With Bill Moyers” ask him?

I put the veteran broadcaster on the spot when we sat down to talk recently, figuring the man who’d interviewed everyone from Joseph Campbell to Maurice Sendak to Ronald Reagan might conjure up a question that no one else in our overpopulated media universe had thought to ask. I wasn’t disappointed. Formulated between nibbles on a salad in the green room of the “Now” studios here in lower Manhattan, Moyers’ response illustrates why the genteel 70-year-old journalist remains a beacon of intellectual clarity amid the tsunami of trash-talking bilge that passes for journalism in today’s vast 500-channel wasteland.

“I’d like to ask the president how is it that you can grow up well loved and well taught and well bred and be so unaware of other people’s reality?” Moyers said. “How can privilege come to be a source of isolation so powerful that it prevents you from knowing the hurts and needs and hopes of others?”

It quickly became clear that Moyers -- who will leave “Now” in December to make documentaries and write a book about his years as an aide to Lyndon Baines Johnson -- was puzzling over how two born-again Texans such as Bush and himself could’ve taken such separate paths in life. “I guess I’d like to know: Why did the president, after he had his born-again experience, go into serving the powerful and the privileged instead of the people who are left out of the American bounty?” Moyers said. “It says something about the power of religion to reinforce our circumstantial benefits or distort our vision that we could have come from the same place and yet gone in such different directions.”

As Moyers once said of himself, “I am a journalist, but I am also a pilgrim.” The ordained Baptist minister-turned-TV commentator has always been ready and willing to wrestle with the big spiritual issues of the time. When “Now” arrived in January 2002, Moyers found a new pulpit to preach from. Clearly angered by how the renewal of civic values in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks had been plundered by what he calls “wartime opportunists -- the mercenaries of Washington, the lobbyists, lawyers and political fundraisers,” Moyers has used “Now” as a razor-sharp scythe for laying bare issues rarely scrutinized by his media peers.

With Moyers and co-host David Brancaccio at the helm, “Now’s” team of reporters has regularly put the rest of the media to shame, pursuing stories few others bother to touch. Its first broadcast offered a devastating report on the secret meetings Vice President Dick Cheney had with a host of energy and oil company officials. Since then, the show, which airs Fridays at 8 p.m. on KCET-TV, has spotlighted all sorts of corporate shenanigans, exposed (with ABC News’ Brian Ross) the lavish parties corporations hosted at this summer’s political conventions and skewered local TV news’ failure to cover political issues (in San Francisco, the first time a Republican candidate for state Assembly made it on the local news was when she was in a car crash). Before the presidential debates this fall, “Now” examined how the debates had been “rigged” by the Commission on Presidential Debates, a corporate-sponsored group created by the two major political parties that established rules, by secret contract, preventing candidates from questioning each other and audience members from asking follow-up questions in the town-hall forum.

Moyers’ interest in far-flung topics is felt in the breadth of “Now” stories. The newsmagazine went to Israel to explore the influence Christian Zionists have had on the Bush White House’s Middle East policy, complete with an eye-popping clip of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), before the Israeli parliament, declaring “I stand before you today in solidarity, as an Israeli at heart.” It traveled to a small mountain meadow in Colorado where a scientist studying global warming has simulated the climate we’ll have in 50 years, producing sagebrush where lupine used to grow. And “Now” visited Mississippi, where Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, in an effort to cure the state’s budget woes, has cut Medicaid coverage for thousands of poor elderly residents, including cancer victims, dialysis patients and the mentally disabled, while refusing to raise the state’s tobacco tax, currently one of the nation’s lowest at 18 cents a pack.

“Now’s” most impressive achievement remains its dogged coverage of the FCC’s attempt to relax the rules governing media ownership -- a story that got skimpy treatment from media outlets who (choose your poison) found it too dull or ignored it because they had a stake in the outcome. When the FCC held a rare public hearing in New York City, just a cab ride away from network newsrooms, “Now” was the only TV outlet that showed up. With “Now” in the lead, an unlikely alliance of family-value proponents and anti-media consolidation activists beat back the deregulation effort. It was a triumph of something we rarely get from today’s attention-deficit-plagued news shows -- connecting the dots. Similarly, when Moyers reported Barbour’s refusal to raise Mississippi’s cigarette tax, he noted that Barbour, in a past incarnation as a high-powered lobbyist, had served clients from nearly every big tobacco firm.

I would argue that Moyers’ unlikely TV soul brother is Jon Stewart, another master of dot connecting, albeit with sly humor. As Michael Moore put it earlier this year, when it comes to TV political coverage, “There’s Jon Stewart and Bill Moyers, everything else is a sugar-coated lie.” For anyone frustrated with the fecklessness of today’s news reporting, Moyers and Stewart are a bracing yin and yang antidote, the Jewish smart-aleck who loves to do Johnny Carson spit takes and the sober Baptist sermonizer who can quote from Reinhold Niebuhr, Learned Hand and Euripides without breaking a sweat. As it turns out, Moyers is a Stewart fan: “The great satirists always used the medium not just to tell a joke, but make a point, which is what Jon does -- he gets the connection between satire and political truth.”

Laughter takes the sting out of truth telling. Moyers’ critique of American corporate hegemony, though no more barbed than the gibes of “The Daily Show,” has earned him a swarm of detractors. When Moyers delivered a blistering “Now” assault on the Republican “zealous ideologues” who swept both houses of Congress in the 2002 midterm elections, Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) called it “the most irresponsible thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” Not long after, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly attacked Moyers for, among other things, calling him a “warmonger,” a label Moyers says never crossed his lips. What really bothers Moyers, who was in the White House when public broadcasting was created in the 1960s, is the recent politicization of PBS. Its two new shows are rightward-leaning: a talk show with Tucker Carlson, and “The Journal Editorial Report,” hosted by Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot.

“In my 33 years at public broadcasting, it’s the first time I’ve seen shows that were clearly created for ideological reasons,” he said. As for conservative attacks on “Now,” he says, “What really gets under their skin isn’t my opinions, but that we’re telling stories they don’t want to be told.” What irks Moyers is that PBS seems to be mimicking a format already available everywhere else on TV -- people shouting at each other rather than investigating an issue.

Moyers isn’t sad about his exit from “Now,” saying he’s departing on his own terms. What grieves him is the sorry state of our media culture. After watching the hapless performance of various news outlets during the Swift Boat Veterans smear campaign, he imagines how they would have covered the 1950s-era Red Scare. “CNN would’ve had its anchor report, ‘Joe McCarthy says there are 275 Communists in the State Department. A spokesman for the State Department denied it.’ And then, if it was Fox or MSNBC, they would’ve had two people on, arguing about it.”

It’s hard to imagine someone as serene and soft-spoken as Moyers having become such a polarizing figure. I suspect it’s largely due to his being the messenger bearing the bad tidings, sounding the alarm that our democracy is in danger of being hijacked by a vast array of corporate interests. One day, discussing how the term “liberal” has been demonized in recent years, Moyers was reminded of Galileo, who was condemned as a heretic for being the messenger of bad tidings in his time. “The church hated him because he undid the neat arrangement of their world,” he explained. “People don’t want to see their safe map undone or redrawn.” It’s an apt description of what it’s like to be an outspoken critic, so apt that Moyers could just as easily have been talking about himself.

The Big Picture appears Tuesdays in Calendar. E-mail comments, suggestions or criticism to patrick.goldstein@ latimes.com.