Bill Moyers, Sugar Daddy of the Radical Left

I hesitated to post again (at least, outside of awarding him a Weekly Jackass award) on Bill Moyers, who I have viewed as an inconsequential quack whose exit from TV 'journalism' will have precisely zero impact on our culture. I put the scare quotes around journalism because Moyers is, plain and simple, a polemicist. (I'm not being hypocritical - blogging of the sort I do is polemical in nature, and I freely admit it. I have never claimed the honorific 'journalist'.) Consider the following opening of a Moyers speech on December 1st, upon receiving the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Harvard University Center for Health and the Global Environment:

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

By this, I suppose Moyers is criticizing Bush's principled stand against terrorism and his belief that religious organizations ought not to be completely excluded from our civic discourse. It's hard to take seriously his criticism of ideology - Bush says 'no litmus test' on Roe v. Wade, for example, while for Democrats the right to an abortion is the highest principle, a belief not to be violated under penalty of explusion from polite society. Moyers employs the tactics of the propagandist here and elsewhere, labeling his opponents as 'delusional' and hinting at broad conspiracies among the rich and powerful.

In other words, Moyers is a typical 'Progressive' voice, railing against an America that is at odds with his vision of a world of secular moral relativism. What you may not know is that Moyers puts his money where his mouth is - a LOT of money, millions and millions of dollars. Moyers is the President of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, a foundation with a $90 million endowment that doles out dollars to leftist causes, tax-exempt. Here are a few of the 'fair and balanced' organizations supported by Schumann Center grants administered by the same Bill Moyers who so sanctimoniously condemns the Bush administration for its ideological bent: the Washington Monthly, The Nation, Mother Jones, In These Times, the American Prospect, Sojourners, Salon.com, and the Sierra Club. The kicker: the organization headed by the anti-capitalist, neo-Marxist Moyers derives the majority of its income from stocks in oil companies. For a discussion of this and other Moyers escapades, see this informative article by Lowell Ponte.

Given his continuing role in funding the Radical Left, I think we need to continue to keep an eye on our good friend Moyers. I have a sneaking suspicion we haven't heard the last of him...

Update 12/18/04 5:32 central: Benjamin at Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite has published a far deeper and more lucid critique of Moyers than mine - I suggest you read it...