In addition to disparaging Brian Williams for offering a "candygram" to Barack Obama in prime time, PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers organized another one-sided left-wing discussion on the alleged conservative bias of the news media last Friday, picking up on Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne’s complaint that the media are giving too much time and weight to Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich on the Sotomayor nomination. Former NPR correspondent Brooke Gladstone, who now hosts the weekly show On The Media for WNYC radio (distributed nationally by NPR), denounced the "canard" of liberal media bias and how it causes "overbalance":

Conservative talk-show hosts and bloggers have been hammering away at the gooey NBC News Inside the White House specials with Brian Williams adoring Obama. But Williams also drew fire from the hard-core left. On Friday’s Bill Moyers Journal, the PBS omnipresence and former LBJ press aide said Williams offered a "candygram" to the president:

BILL MOYERS: Meanwhile, NBC News this week delivered a candygram to the president -- two prime time specials called "Inside the Obama White House." President Obama couldn't have asked for a sweeter salute...

BRIAN WILLIAMS: People react strongly to this president. We've seen people moved to tears after just the briefest encounter with him.

MOYERS: As for an exclusive revelation about your government from behind the White House's closed doors, well, hold your breath, here it comes...

WILLIAMS: There are apples everywhere. Orchards worth of them in bowls throughout the building. They are meant of course to promote healthy eating but what we saw more often is this: the West Wing may lead the western world in candy consumption.

WHITE HOUSE STAFFER: These are official White House M&Ms.

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers isn’t proud of his power-lusting service as a White House hatchet man for Lyndon Johnson. But he isn’t doing himself or PBS any favors by misleading reporters who are nosing around into how he helped invade the sexual privacy of the White House staff in the LBJ era. Over at Slate, Jack Shafer first wrote a great piece on how Moyers wanted the press man-handled for Lyndon. (Read the whole thing.)

Then he added a piece that did some sleuthing to demonstrate that Moyers, that scold of Republican truth-mangling, tried to mislead The Washington Post. Shafer, a left-leaning libertarian sort, insisted "my beef with Moyers isn't what he did in the mid-1960s but his refusal to acknowledge in a straightforward manner what he did." Here's how it unfolded:

The Washington Post asked him last week to comment on its discovery that he had directed the FBI to investigate Johnson administration figures who were "suspected as having homosexual tendencies." He confessed to the Post via e-mail of having scant memories of the incidents of four decades ago but volunteered that the inquiries could have been in response to allegations brought to Johnson by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

In an editorial titled "J. Edgar Moyers," the Wall Street Journal picked right up on Thursday’s historical revelations on the front page of The Washington Post about the FBI investigating the sexuality of Lyndon Johnson’s aide Jack Valenti. The Journal noted that PBS host Bill Moyers, a regular lecturer on other people’s depredations of civil liberties, was doing his own work with the snoops in the 1960s:

The dossier also reveals that Mr. Moyers -- then a special assistant to LBJ -- requested in 1964 that Hoover's G-men "investigate two other administration figures who were 'suspected as having homosexual tendencies.'"

This isn't the first time Mr. Moyers's name has come up in connection with Hoover's abuse of office. When Laurence Silberman, now a federal appeals judge, was acting Attorney General in 1975, he was obliged to read Hoover's secret files in their entirety in preparation for testimony before Congress -- and as far as we know remains one of the only living officials to have done so. "It was the single worst experience of my long governmental service," he wrote in these pages in 2005.

On Friday night, PBS star Bill Moyers took up the question of the media’s coverage of President Obama. It was not a liberal vs. conservative debate. His panel was two left-wing bloggers: Glenn Greenwald of Salon and Jay Rosen of PressThink. Unsurprisingly, they felt the media weren’t "progressive" enough.

But Greenwald went far beyond that, making claims that "establishment media venues" forged a political "partnership" with the Republican Party and "the right wing" during the Lewinsky affair that continued and "translated into the media being blindly supportive and reverent of the Bush administration." He also claimed – against all evidence – that massive demonstrations against the Iraq war in 2003 were almost ignored: "the media virtually excluded those demonstrations from the narrative."

These strange theories erupted without Moyers really demanding an attack on the media elite:

MOYERS: The Rasmussen Poll this week shows an eight point drop in support for the stimulus plan, what do you make of that?

GREENWALD: You know, I think if you go back to the 1990s, what you saw is essentially a partnership between the Republican Party, the right wing, and establishment media venues. And this partnership was formed when they were essentially engaged in their lynch mob over the Lewinsky affair.

The absence of liberal outrage over Barack Obama’s decision to reject public financing for his presidential campaign took a jaw-dropping turn on the hard-left Pacifica Radio network and its show "Democracy Now!" Host Amy Goodman, who regularly welcomes long screeds from Bill Moyers and his fervor about our bought-and-sold elections, welcomed two campaign "reformers" on Monday, and both failed to criticize Obama or his decision. Goodman proclaimed: "I have to say, it’s interesting to hear campaign finance groups be so uncritical of this decision when this is the very issue that, for example, you, John Rauh, have set up your organization around, Americans for Campaign Reform, and particularly around the issue of clean money and elections and cutting down the role money plays in elections."

This raises the question: have liberals been touting campaign finance "reform" out of genuine socialist conviction, or has it all just been a cynical pose that only lasts as long as they perceive conservatives and Republicans will have a campaign fundraising advantage? Where is Bill Moyers on this? He skipped the fire-and-brimstone sermonizing about it on his Bill Moyers Journal last Friday, a day after Obama’s announcement.

(Editor's note: this column was syndicated on Friday.)

It’s axiomatic that people who’ve disgraced themselves are the last to realize it, or maybe the first to pretend they don’t know. Take longtime CBS anchorman Dan Rather, who shredded his own reputation by smearing President Bush’s military service with phony documents.

He’s still at it, still in shameless self-denial, raging against the world, still pontificating about that which he has no standing to speak about: Journalism ethics. On June 7, he mounted a soapbox at a far-left event in Minneapolis called the "National Conference for Media Reform," perhaps the last and perhaps the best forum interested in his opinion.

In front of this fervent group of leftists, Rather tried to put on Superman’s cape and pledge to push back against the evil forces "that imperil journalism…and impair democracy itself." In Rather’s vision, blatantly biased reporting is not only what passes for "journalism," it is the lifeblood of democracy. Dismiss Dan Rather for a lack of professionalism, and suddenly, you’re part of the corporate media vast right-wing conspiracy against Jeffersonian ideals.

In America, you need to show identification to buy alcohol, get into a bar, or apply for a job. Yet, for some reason, liberal media members think that Republicans who advocate voter ID laws do so exclusively to prevent Democrats from going to polling booths.

Such was clearly evident Friday evening when Bill Moyers discussed some recent Supreme Court rulings with CNN and New Yorker magazine's legal affairs analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

Better strap yourself in tightly, for the following from "Bill Moyers Journal" on PBS is guaranteed to offend all that actually believe voter identification should be required in every state (video embedded right):

Bill Moyers appeared not only on The Daily Show Tuesday, but on the Tavis Smiley show on PBS, where he repeated all his lines in defense of Jeremiah Wright. Moyers also declared that while "I believe in capitalism...the tension between capitalism and democracy is that capitalism breeds inequality while democracy aims for more equality," and the media serves only the rich. When Smiley asked if were "witnessing the fall of the American empire," Moyers said yes, and that "it's probably a good thing that our empire has reached the extent of it -- has extended itself so far that it's beginning to have to have some second thoughts about it."

The talk of America's "empire," as if America were no different than ancient Rome, came near the end of the segment:

SMILEY: How would you respond if I said to you, Bill Moyers, that we are witnessing the fall of the American empire? You are a student of history. You know that every empire eventually falls. And what if I said to you that our democracy is so dysfunctional that it is irreparable, and that what you and I are witnessing, sad to say, is the fall of the American empire?

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers appeared on Tuesday’s edition of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, and delivered a long-winded defense of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who he said was "assassinated by soundbites." Moyers regurgitated the original, discredited Obama line, that out of 200,000 minutes from the pulpit, "His whole life, his whole ministry, his whole career was being summed up in sound bites that added up to no more than 20 seconds endlessly played through the media grinder of our national press." Wright was just making a few errors, like most of us do, he argued: "All of us have made absurd statements. I know that Rev. Wright, whom I had never met before this, was no doubt, had misspoken and made some erratic statements and all that. Most of us do." [audio available here]

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers was interviewed on the radical taxpayer-subsidized Pacifica Radio network's Democracy Now program on Wednesday, and declared that Hillary Clinton wishes the worst on Barack Obama -- "she keeps hoping for every day, is that lightning will strike him" and insisted "She can only win in a way that would leave the Democratic Party in shambles." Even so, Moyers complained that all three candidates are failing to correct a "dysfunctional" capitalist system.

Moyers also made excuses for Jeremiah Wright's wild sermons about 9/11 and AIDS, and brushed off suggestions that his interview could have been tougher. "I’m not a very adversarial fellow. I’m not a gotcha kind of journalist," he claimed. "I knew that they were going to be asking all of these questions. I leave that to those people whose job it is for the commercial media." He decried the ABC debate questions to Obama as "a great exercise in irrelevance."

Do my tax dollars really have to support the anti-American vitriol that comes out of the mouth of PBS's Bill Moyers every week?

Before you answer, consider that the host of "Bill Moyers Journal" followed up last week's much publicized sycophantic lovefest with Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama's America-hating pastor by going on a six minute defense of the junior senator from Illinois and the reverend this Friday which was filled with Democrat talking points.

Readers are warned to proceed with caution before either reviewing the highly-offensive transcript that follows, or clicking on the embedded video in the upper-right (h/t TVNewser):

The Bill Moyers PBS interview of Barack Obama’s long-time minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, underlined once again that our tax dollars don’t fund programs championing racial harmony. They fund programs that celebrate black radicals, militants, and kooks. Moyers came to Rev. Wright’s side not to condemn him or even challenge him, but to praise him and defend him. As he implored Wright to explain his "God damn America" sermon, Wright at least said he was free in America to denounce America. To which Moyers replied: "Well, you can be almost crucified for saying what you've said here in this country."

Bill Moyers wants us to see Jeremiah Wright as the Jesus Christ of our time?

As NewsBusters' Brent Baker reported last Friday, Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was "interviewed" last week by PBS's Bill Moyers, and the broadcast networks fell for the snowjob hook, line, and sinker.

Quite surprisingly, Howard Kurtz's panel on Sunday's "Reliable Sources" were far less impressed, in particular, former New York Times columnist William Safire who deliciously framed the interview as a "a loving conversation. And Bill Moyers is a liberal, was from the word go, and he was doing his best to make the most for Jeremiah Wright."

Wonderfully, Kurtz and his panel members, unlike seemingly all the rest of the currently fawning over Jeremiah media, agreed:

Interviewed by Bill Moyers for a PBS show to be aired on the night of April 25, 2008, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. accused people of trying to paint  him as "un-American" or "some sort of fanatic" for purposes of harming the candidacy of Barack Obama. (AP Photo/PBS, Robin Holland, HO)

It is NBC Green Week, after all, so who can blame Andrea Mitchell for recycling two dilapidated defenses of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright?

Mitchell's heart didn't seem wholly in it, but like a burned-out public defender going through the motions, Andrea apparently felt constrained to mount some kind of defense of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's controversial remarks. And so she trotted out two hoary chestnuts:

• that's the way it's done in African-American churches, and
• media critics say he was "taken out of context."

View video here.

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.

The next time someone claims PBS is an oasis of fairness and balance, suggest they notice that Bill Moyers writes fundraising letters for hard-left political efforts. Arriving in the mail at liberal households over the holidays is a direct-mail fundraiser from Jim Hightower, the former agriculture commissioner of Texas and washed-up talk show host. He has a new, cheap newsletter ($10 annual subscription), and included is a testimonial with the Moyers mug on it. Moyers wrote that Hightower's work is better than Heaven, and the she-God learned immensely from it:

Dear fellow citizen,

I am told the first thing the late people's pundit Molly Ivins did upon reaching that Great Valhalla of Scribes in the Sky was to whip out the latest edition of The Hightower Lowdown and read it aloud to the multitude of saints, angels, and cherubs gathered to greet her.

You may have heard of "Hentish," the dog in The New York Times that was shot and killed by a Blackwater security guard earlier this week. However in the media's over zealous attempt to crucify Blackwater USA they left out a surprisingly telling piece about some of the dogs that were harbored at the Times compound in Baghdad.

The New York Post reported yesterday that these dogs had already attacked people before, including Eason Jordan who runs the blog IraqSlogger.com, and is a former CNN chief news executive.

"Eason's encounter, revealed on his blog yesterday, involved a dog named Scratch and left him with ‘three deep gashes in my right hand, sending blood spewing in all directions,'" the Post story said.

Eason's blog post also revealed other canine nightmares:

Call it a meeting of the Bush-bashing minds. Longtime PBS host Bill Moyers invited on MSNBC host Keith Olbermann for Friday’s edition of Bill Moyers Journal. The strangest moment came as Moyers suggested that in a polarized country, it might be distasteful for journalists to favor one side. Moyers must be playing devil’s advocate, because he’s been every bit as vituperative against Bush as Olbermann.

The worries about polarization and contributing to "a nation of screechers" came up twice.

BILL MOYERS: It seems to me that this country has become two choirs, each side listening to, only to its own preachers. If -- should journalists take sides when everybody else is polarized?

It certainly won't come as a surprise to NewsBusters readers that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is more separated from reality than virtually any member of the media.

Still, the idea this former sportscaster and current liberal commentator actually considers what he does as "really journalism" should shock and disgust any member of said profession, even Bill Moyers who had Olbermann as a guest on Friday's "Journal."

Wonderfully, referring to himself as a journalist wasn't the only hysterical utterance from Olbermann during this interview, as he also had the unmitigated audacity to criticize conservative radio host Michael Savage for "basically just spattering invective on people he didn't like."

Hey, Keith, have you ever actually watched your program or read a transcript?

As the answer to this question appears to definitely be "No," here are some of the lowlights from this interview (video available here, full transcript here):

It's the holiday season for the hard lefties at Democratic Underground:

What's on Keith Olbermann's mind about the media? This week, as Rupert Murdoch takes over the Wall Street Journal and as the FCC is about to allow more newspapers to expand into the broadcast business, BILL MOYERS JOURNAL continues its reporting on media consolidation and gets insight from MSNBC's popular and provocative Keith Olbermann.

As one delighted commenter replied,

Look up "National Treasure" in the dictionary and there's a picture of Bill Moyers.

Former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw took his publicity tour for his Sixties book "Boom!" into (at least somewhat) hostile territory on Monday’s Laura Ingraham show. Ingraham played an old clip in which Brokaw slapped talk radio as "instantly jingoistic and savagely critical" of people questioning war.

Like many other journalists who instantly let conservatives know they haven’t listened to Rush Limbaugh, Brokaw insisted Limbaugh "doesn’t want to hear another point of view, except his." Ingraham disagreed. Brokaw added: "The problem with talk radio is they only want to hear one note...The problem with talk radio is they mock anyone else’s point of view, and they do it often in a mindless fashion." This is rich talk coming from a man whose network hired Bill Moyers as his newscast’s only commentator in 1995, and a man who wrote a syrupy tribute to hot liberal mock-jock Jon Stewart for his "Athenian" ideals in Time magazine. Audio clip (5:05): MP3 audio

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers is once again making speeches with tears in his eyes about the wonders of liberalism, which is apparently not an ideology as much as it's about Kumbaya kinship. Moyers touted the socialist vision of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he won a Freedom of Speech award from the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, and his remarks were excerpted by The Nation. He began by mentioning the blue-collar liberalism of his father:

Henry Moyers was an ordinary man who dropped out of the fourth grade because his family needed him to pick cotton to help make ends meet. The Depression knocked him off the farm and flat on his back. When I was born he was making two dollars a day working on the highway to Oklahoma City. He never made over $100 a week in the whole of his working life, and he made that only when he joined the union on the last job he held. He voted for Franklin Roosevelt in four straight elections, and he would have gone on voting for him until kingdom come if both had lived that long. I once asked him why, and he said, "Because the President's my friend."

To commemorate the Media Research Center’s 20th anniversary this month, we’ve just published a special expanded edition of our ‘Notable Quotables’ newsletter with more than 100 of the most outrageous, sometimes humorous, quotes we’ve uncovered over the past 20 years. Earlier this week, I presented quotes showing the media’s hostility towards Ronald Reagan and other conservatives, and sycophantic coverage of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Today’s installment: America the Awful. On Monday, I recounted how many journalists offered sympathetic coverage of totalitarian communist regimes. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, too many journalists opted to take a harsher approach with their own country. In a commencement address at the State University of New York at New Paltz back on May 21, 2006, New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., exposed his extreme left-wing agenda as he railed against everything he saw as wrong with America:

Video (0:52): Windows (1.64 MB), plus MP3 audio (261 kB).

On Monday’s "Lou Dobbs Tonight," host Lou Dobbs took aim at Katie Couric and Bill Moyers for "silly public statements" they’ve made regarding the practice of wearing an American flag lapel pin. "CBS's Katie Couric, of all people, taking exception to an American journalist saying 'we,' when referring to the United States.... I'm sorry, Katie Couric, but who could possibly be offended by acknowledging those troops who have sacrificed so much for us and ours?... PBS's Bill Moyers says the flag's been hijacked and turned into a logo, the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. Oh, please, Bill Moyers, you're too smart for this kind of babble."

So Sen. Barack Obama has pulled a Bill Moyers -- shunning U.S. flag lapel pins over political disagreements with the Bush administration -- and Time's Joe Klein applauds the move. After all, the Bush White House, according to Klein is an "administration that endorsed the troglyditic religious views of Christian fundamentalist mullahs," among other nasty un-liberal things.

Klein huffs to his conclusion about the "Phony Issue of the Day":

I adore this country and abhor those, especially those lucky enough to live here, who don't. But to the extent that wearing an American flag lapel pin could be misconstrued as support for the most disgraceful administration in my lifetime, perhaps in American history, I can certainly understand why Barack Obama had reservations about it.

Has Bill Moyers become PBS's Jack Cafferty, Bill Maher, Rosie O'Donnell, and Keith Olbermann all rolled into one crusading, Bush-hating, anti-war propagandist funded by American tax dollars?

After all, on Friday, he followed up last week's disgraceful rant about Karl Rove with an eight-minute segment on how "The Bush White House has launched a massive new P.R. campaign with the message: the surge in Iraq is working. Let's stay the course!"

In it, Moyers offered not one shred of balance to this completely anti-war report by totally ignoring recent statements from liberal think tank members, leading Democrats, and military officials indicating that conditions in Iraq are indeed improving.

Instead, Moyers: disgracefully suggested that the White House is misleading Americans about the surge in much the same way it did weapons of mass destruction; mocked military recruiting ads and techniques, and; cited a British newspaper claiming our army is crippled by fatigue. A full transcript of this abomination follows with video available here for those that can stomach it:

As NewsBusters reported last Saturday, PBS's Bill Moyers went on an absolutely disgraceful rant about Karl Rove, George W. Bush, and religion during the August 17 installment of "Bill Moyers Journal."

Two days later, Rove was Chris Wallace's guest on "Fox News Sunday," and took issue with Moyers's comments: "Mr. Moyers ought to do a little bit better research before he does another drive-by slander."

Moyers followed this up with a letter to Wallace posted at his blog Wednesday suggesting that Wallace didn't do his homework concerning Rove, and that Wallace shouldn't "take his every word as gospel."

This Sunday, Wallace fired back (video available here):

You know it's bad when your own ombudsman compares you to Richard Nixon, or suggests that you need an ombudsman devoted only to you. But that's exactly what PBS Ombud Michael Getler has been pushed to with the latest Bill Moyers "editorial", which was covered by our own Noel Sheppard.

Set aside for the moment that in a tirade Moyers referred to the Commander in Chief as "an intellectually incurious draft-averse naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket". That's the PBS equivalent of 'fair and balanced'. At question here is whether or not Karl Rove is a religious man. Moyers postulates that he is not, going off various dubious sources (that Moyers referred to as "circulating reports") such as the outright conjecture of bloggers. Church-attending Karl claims Moyers is wrong. Who are you going to believe?

Getler rightly points out that this type of sourcing "is not up to his [Moyer] standards", which apparently are already far below average journalistic standards. He also points out that, again, Moyers has violated PBS's Editorial Standards and Policies which require that when "a program, segment, or other content is devoted to opinion or commentary, the principle of transparency requires that it be clearly labeled as such" and "should identify who is responsible for the views being presented."

Continue reading the ombud report if you like, but I found it a tiring report of the obvious: Bill Moyers is, as Dan Rather would say - a partisan political operative, cloaked in the auspices of a journalist taking tax money from the public against the will of the majority.