Posted by olvlzl.
I haven’t seen the movie about Murrow yet, not going to the movies for years at a time, I get behind. I just saw “Chicken Run” the other night. The last time I went to a movie theater was when “Hairspray” was in its first time round at the Knee Cramp Bijou. It’s on my list of things that I’ll see someday. Always been more of a music person, you see.
But even without the historical perspective that the best of Hollywood might give, I’m going to go out on a limb. Bill Moyers, the greatest English language, broadcast journalist in history, certainly the greatest from the United States, still walks among us. I'm trying to think of a Goodnight and Good Luck incident in his life that will make for a movie script and am having a hard time coming up with one. Drama there has been but not, so far, that kind of thing. That he may never be honored with a cinematic memorial will, probably, lead to doubters of my assertion but I’m still making it. For what he has accomplished in hard reporting I’m confident in saying that the close competition for the title, either through corporate or historical circumstances, didn't quite go as far as his best work on NOW and several of his special reports broadcast on PBS. His broadcast in the 1980s pointing out the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the then high riding and ascendent fundamentalists and his lifting of numerous cover ups of corporate wrong doing are unmatched by any other individual.
A lot of his success is due to his knowledge of many things, his devotion to the basis of democracy and his fine writing. The kinds of things that are career killers in today’s corporate media. The rest is courage and moral integrity. The kind that doesn’t skimp due to professional mores.
Bill Moyers has "A Parable For Our Times" which is the best seasonal meditation I've seen so far this year.
Of course it’s hard to grasp what really motivated this movement. Many of the new conservative elites profess devotion to the needs of ordinary people, in contrast with some of their counterparts a hundred years ago who were often Social Darwinists, and couldn’t have been more convinced that a vast chasm between the rich and poor is the natural state of things. But after 30 years of conservative revival and a dramatic return of the discredited “voodoo economics” of the 1980s under George W. Bush, it’s reasonable to follow the old biblical proverb that says by their fruits you shall know them. By that realistic standard, I think the Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow’s analysis sums it up well: What it’s all about, he simply said, is “the redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful."