Tom Shales Hails Moyers, Wails for Sally Field

In his review of television for the year 2007, Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales bitterly recounted Fox's allegedly political censorship of actress Sally Field at the Emmy Awards, when she said if mothers ran the world, there would be no "goddamned wars." Shales complained that the lack of profanity "befouled" the airwaves:

The Emmy Awards were marred by a dark and perhaps portentous moment that also involved an unexpected -- and in this case, totally unwarranted -- silence. Sally Field was accepting a prize and talking about mothers and war when suddenly the Fox censor chose to delete some of her words before they could go out to America on the time-delayed telecast. Fox used the absurd FCC crackdown on "obscenity" as its excuse, but the action smacked of political censorship and seriously befouled the American airwaves.

By contrast, Shales loved PBS gurus Ken Burns and Bill Moyers. Shales adored the Moyers special "Buying the War," which didn't include a conservative voice in it anywhere as Moyers argued the media were all tools for conservatives:

Proving again that he plays a distinctive, valuable role in television, Moyers reported on reporting -- how the media rolled over and played along obediently with the administration's prosecution of the Iraq war.