Bill Moyers, eminence of public affairs broadcasting, dies at 91

[pat_k]

46. Bill Moyers, "citizen journalist."

“I’m an old-fashion liberal when it comes to being open and being interested in other people’s ideas,” he said during a 2004 radio interview. But Moyers preferred to term himself a “citizen journalist” operating independently, outside the establishment. (PBS News link)

I, like many other "boomers," came to know him through Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. A recollection from Betty Sue Flowers who worked with him on the series:

Waco native Betty Sue Flowers, University of Texas Plan II director and English professor before becoming director of the LBJ Library, got to know Moyers when she worked with him on what was arguably his best-known television series, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. She recalled meeting him one morning for breakfast at a hotel coffee shop in New York, and as she waited for Moyers, uncharacteristically late, she glanced out the window and saw an elderly, obviously mentally disturbed woman, coatless in the cold, trying to drag a large suitcase down the street.

When Moyers finally showed up, he apologized. He told Flowers he had encountered a woman on the street who needed help and had waited with her until social services arrived.

“It hadn’t occurred to me, sitting in a warm restaurant reading a newspaper, to take any responsibility to help her,” Flowers recalled. “I was reminded of what Bill’s partner in Public Affairs Television, Joan Konner, once told me: that while we were playing to the tune of our own little flutes, Bill somehow had access to a pipe organ on another level entirely. That was true of his character as well as of his creativity.” Texas Monthly lilnk

And it was coming across the following clip from the Power of Myth back in November that prompted me to revisit Schopenhauer.

And that lead me to post Schopenhauer's observations on the "radical difference of mental habit between the good character and the bad" here: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219688952#post1

Bill Moyers was a man of good character, by any definition.