with evan smith is provided in part by hillco partners, texas government affairs consultancy and its global health care consulting business unit, hillco health. and by the mattson mchale foundation in support of public television. and also by mfi foundation, improving the quality of life within our community. and also by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation and viewers like you. thank you. >> smith: i'm evan smith. he's an icon of public media and progressive politics whose first job in journalism, as a cub reporter in marshall, texas, was more than six decades ago. his newest public television show, moyers and company, debuts this month. he's bill moyers. this is overheard.

>> smith: bill moyers, welcome. >> moyers: my pleasure. >> smith: so good to see you, an honor to have you here. >> moyers: good to be home. >> smith: thank you. well, welcome home. >> moyers: thank you. >> smith: let me ask you to play the barometric role that you do for so many people around the country, particularly who share your world view. tell us the state of things. how are things going? we look to you to tell us and my sense is that your view of the world today is not so rosy. >> moyers: well, people ask me how are you and i say, i'm fine. i'm much better than the country, and that is because washington, politics, government, paralyzed and polarized. deficits are mounting. none of our problems are getting resolved. it reminds me of a period i know only from reading, the period of the 1850s when

politics failed to deal with the issue of slavery. as a result we had four years of a bitter, bloody civil war, almost lost the fledgling union. a hundred years after that we still bore the consequences of the failure of politics in the 1850s, and while there is no issue as morally repugnant right now as slavery, some of our issues could take us down as a republic, as a democracy, if we don't address them. mark twain wrote a story called the terrible catastrophe in which he got the characters in his story into such a fix they could only, they couldn't get out of it. and he finally said in the last sentence of that short story, i've got us in such a mess nobody can solve it. if you can help, try. well, that is where we are today. we are in a state where democracy is not working. it is not solving our problems that we've created. the economy has stopped working for everyday men and women. newest studies show without any doubt that however you slice and dice the numbers, 40% of the income between

1979 and 2007 went to the upper one percent of the population. so all of these issues which are not receiving any serious political attention, are festering, growing, and you know we take our existence for granted after 200 some odd years, but we shouldn't. every republic has gone through cycles of monarchy, anarchism, and oligarchy, and there is nothing that, unless we take control of our destiny, there is nothing to keep us from following what our founders, madison and jefferson, felt was the arc of democracy, which is like that. so we've got some serious issues and they worry all of us. >> smith: now the occupy wall street protests, which have expanded around the country and around the world, it sounds like, are an emblem of exactly what you are describing. they are making the same argument as you are. >> moyers: yes, they may not be as particular, any one of them, as i have been in answering your question, but the fact of the matter is that the reporters are down there. >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: they are asking all these young people... by the way the average age, i was told just yesterday,

of the folks at occupy wall street are -- is 27. so it is not just a bunch of kids. >> smith: yep. >> moyers: in high school or the first years of college. there are a lot of gray-haired people down there, a lot of schoolteachers, a lot of ex-fire. a lot of marines. it is, a, really a reflection of america's gene pool, if you would. so the reporters say, why are you here? and they don't give you the particular answer that i would, but they are occupying wall street because they know that wall street has occupied the country. and in the last thirty years most of the income growth in this country has gone to the financial, insurance, wall street building, and the financialization of politics. there was a great sign by a senior citizen about my age, in occupy iowa, which was the movement there, this lady was carrying a sign that said, i couldn't afford to buy politicians so i bought this sign. [ laughter ] they get it. people get it that our system, our

political system is subjected to the power of big money rather than to the needs and hopes of ordinary people. >> smith: and you made the point that it is both parties. you know you have said before, said recently at the public citizen 40th anniversary event at which you spoke that gop really stands for guardians of privilege. at this point the argument leveled against the republican party is a party of the rich, whether you agree with it or not, is one we've heard many times before, but you are as pointed in your criticism of president obama and the democrats for doing exactly the same thing that we criticize the republicans for. >> moyers: and president clinton. i mean, it was... >> smith: so you go back, you go back before obama. >> moyers: the counterrevolution, the business and corporate revolution against the new deal and the great society, when we were advocating vigorous government in the interest of public action, that counterrevolution began in the 19.in the early 1980s under reagan. but as this financialization of our, of america took place and wall street and

the banks gained more and more power, they were in with both parties rewriting the rules of politics and the economy. there is a book you, everyone here must read called, winner take all politics: how washington made the rich richer and turned its back on the middle class. it is by two acclaimed political scientists, jacob hacker yale and paul pearson of berkeley, and their conclusion is that step by step, debate by debate, over the last thirty years, the fortunate few, the people with big money rewrote the rules of politics and the economy to favor a relative few at the expense of many. and democrats played that game as well. >> smith: well, you have in fact compared what the democrats have done, and this administration has done, to money laundering. you've said, you said specifically it is money laundering in service to

power and policy. >> moyers: that's campaign contributions. i mean this is. >> smith: and citizens united you include in that >> moyers: yes, this is, yes citizens united. the decision by the supreme court which allows corporations and unions, although unions don't have that much money, to pour as much money from anonymous sources as they wish into our elections. and one of your texans, karl rove, is a genius at gathering this money from anonymous wealthy sources and running ads to get it. i know republicans and democrats who spend most of their time, including some progressive democrats, raising money. >> smith: chasing money. yeah. >> moyers: chasing money. >> smith: right. >> moyers: it has become a toxic poison. >> smith: right. >> moyers: in the artery of our body politic. >> smith: but again, bill, it crosses party lines, because as much as you say, yes, karl rove's crossroads group is raising a ton of money, on the democratic side, at least in this cycle, there is the equivalent effort and the democrats that are leading that effort will say, well, it is an arms raise and we have to keep up. >> moyers: yeah, that happened in the 1980's. >> smith: but in fact they are doing the exact same thing that the other side is doing. >> moyers: yes, the democratic party retains some, some hint of its longtime commitment to the

working people of this country, to the henry and ruby moyers of marshall. my father voted four straight elections for franklin roosevelt, called him, my friend in the white house. of course, my father never met franklin roosevelt. because the democratic party was, in the period of the 30s and 40s, on the side of the working people more than they were on the side of the malefactors of great wealth, as franklin roosevelt said. and so it was when the democrats got into this arms race, started. there is a famous memo written by lewis powell, corporate lawyer, member of the board of a big tobacco company, to the chamber of commerce in 1971, august 23rd, 1971, calling for a counterrevolution to the new deal and to the great society. and with that the conservatives and the business community began to

raise these huge sums of money and changed the rules. democrats bought into that because they had to keep up, they thought. >> smith: right. >> moyers: keep their incumbents elected. when they did that they turned away from their longtime commitments to working people and the middle class. and as a result of that, in this book i mentioned to you, winner take all, these two political scientists conclude that the middle class in america has been written out of the political script of this country. oh, there are television ads and there are speeches, but in terms of the policies enacted after the election is over -- >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: the policies favor the relative few at the expense of the many. >> smith: so what is the speaking, is there an antidote? how would you, how would you unmake... we know what is wrong with the system. how would you unmake what is wrong and right it then? >> moyers: i have no overnight wand to wave. >> smith: right, take more time than overnight. i mean, give us a solution that takes more time. >> moyers: it was thirty years ago that the conservatives and the business community devised

this brilliant strategy. it is a brilliant strategy. they decided to take over a party. you know, the tea party has become the nominating wing of the republican party. you cannot, romney or whomever, they cannot be nominated without the tacit support. >> smith: tacit blessing. right. >> moyers: of the tea party system. there is no equivalent in the democratic party any longer. journalists don't try to elect candidates; we don't try to defeat candidates. we don't give advice to people, except like this. if i were in that cadre of people who are guiding the tea party, i would say this is a long fight, you've got to become political, you must not denigrate politics as the means of influencing your destiny in this country, despite everything i've said to the contrary. i would set out to take over the democratic party. the conservatives have a party. democrats have a party only when the lobbyists lend it back to them for a certain amount of time. >> smith: well, many people have wondered why there isn't, you know, just as they say where are the liberal equivalents of

limbaugh and o'reilly and hannity, and i guess msnbc has in the absence of anything else, risen to be, to be that. why is there no progressive equivalent to the tea party? some have fantasized about a coffee party; in fact there are loosely formed groups of coffee party groups. >> moyers: that is a pale imitation group. >> smith: is there some? what has kept the progressive side of politics from developing its own version of the tea party? >> moyers: i think primarily because the democratic party and the progressive party has been, and the progressives in that party have been the party of government for so long that it was hard to be so critical of the incumbents who had represented you for so long. >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: as the democratic party began to move away from its base >> smith: yep. >> moyers: in unions and working class people and ordinary folks around the country, that divide has opened up. but i think primarily it is because we haven't been that long, the progressive side of american politics, that long the outsider.

it's hard to be as fiercely angry as the tea party is. i think both sides. i am a progressive. i am a progressive because i believe... >> smith: are you a democrat? >> moyers: i am an independent, and i am not going to go into my voting record because it is private. but.. >> smith: so if i ask you if you are going to support obama despite the flaws that you have identified you won't tell me. >> moyers: i wouldn't tell you and i don't know what i will do. obama has been a great disappointment to a lot of people. >> smith: and to you. >> moyers: if he wins reelection... yes, and i've said so on the air. >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: i am not popular at the obama white house, because during the election of '08 i was quite analytical in the, in our criticism, our calling...you know, i had on jeremiah wright, his pastor who felt he had been really wronged. no our job, as i said, is not to elect or defeat candidates. as a citizen i will vote. you can ask jim lehrer about that. he used to think, he used to say, i don't vote because i shouldn't be biased in that regard, but i can't denigrate the political right we have as individuals to try to make our single,

our single political act as a voter work. but i am disappointed... i think the job of journalists is to truly raise the questions that you would ask, they would ask, if they had access that we have. and it is true for the party in power, if that happens to have been traditionally your party or the party out of power, the new party that comes to power. >> smith: well, let's stay there. let's talk about journalists and journalism in the media, because maybe the only thing that could make us feel better about the state of politics is to talk about the state of the media, which by comparison maybe makes politics look good. do you have any optimism about our profession, your longtime profession, my profession, that the work that we are doing can have value or does have value now? >> moyers: let me finish one other point i was making. >> smith: of course. >> moyers: it's a long run, the answer to your question, what do we do, it is a long run political campaign by people who care enough about what is happening, just like the populists in the 1880s and the progressives between

1895 and 1912, a year ago this next -- 100 years ago this year. they laid the groundwork for the new deal. when capitalism collapsed in 1929 there were all these programs, the markers of civilization, minimum wage, social security, all of those, that safety net was in place, so it is a long campaign to turn the country around. and i think if enough young people take this on long after i am gone, there will be a political movement that will try to restore the public interest to public policy. >> smith: okay. >> moyers: the media, changing very rapidly. >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: 15,000 journalists fired or let go in the last five years from broadcast news and newspapers, and that's -- while there was never a golden age of journalism in our country, there was a period of time in which there were more watchdogs. >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: over the municipal, political entities in our country.

you know, nobody -- it takes a reporter to go out and dig deep into documents showing that the water, municipal authority in a local town has been corrupted by deals and all that. that kind of journalism has been disappearing from the public sphere. we are getting increasingly in broadcast medium news that amuses us, that entertains us, that doesn't take our attention span very seriously. >> smith: right. >> moyers: that doesn't, you know the broadcast medium as a whole, public broadcasting excepted, looks out and sees an audience of consumers, not an audience of citizens, and if you look out and see -- >> smith: by which you include commercial corporate. would you include new york times, washington post, wall street journal? >> moyers: no i am talking about broadcast >> smith: just broadcast, right. >> moyers: broadcasting in particular, there is still a tradition of... >> moyers: you mentioned limbaugh and o'reilly and hannity. they are not journalists. they are not journalists. they are the arm of the republican party, quite frankly, the propaganda arm of the republican party. >> smith: do you think they think they are news? i think they see themselves not in that... >> moyers: you have to answer that question. i don't know whether they consider themselves journalists. limbaugh certainly doesn't.

he would say that, you know, i am an entertainer. >> smith: he would hate to be associated with the likes of us. >> moyers: exactly. there are some encouraging signs, the texas tribune, the minnesota post. there are web -- you're starting, you have started a very hopeful and promising operation here covering local news, web-oriented. the problem might be, having to raise funds for what you do, but you will be independent, right? >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: you will do your best to gather the evidence that people need to make informed decisions. >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: you know, i agree with thomas jefferson, that i would prefer an informed voter to an uninformed voter, an informed citizen to an uninformed citizen. >> smith: right. >> moyers: that is not what silo journalism is about. limbaugh, o'reilly, hannity, fox news, they are in silos reaching their constituents with their information that confirms their belief. a very important study done at the university of michigan over the last five years concludes that if people are presented with a

fact that they know is true but it threatens their belief system, then they will reject the fact in order to protect their belief system. and the survey goes on to show this is why 67% of republicans who watch fox news believe that obama was born in kenya or is a muslim, although he is a christian. our journalism is not popular because it does not support a bias. it intrudes upon your belief system to make you try to weigh the evidence, and that is not popular in our society. >> smith: what about the big newspapers. i mentioned the times and the post and the journal. do you take a dim view of the work they do? in some ways they are the last defense. right? >> moyers: no, no. i read every day, every day, and i don't read every word of everything >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: but i read the new york times, the washington post, the wall street journal, the guardian, the independent, and the financial times. those are foreign newspapers. >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: sometimes i will go online. and i'll look at newspapers around the country.

wall street journal, austin american statesman, if i have some particular interest in that. but i still, and i read a stack of magazines every week. beside my bed is a large stack of magazines and a lot of clippings, because at night i read late and i rip and read. i put the clippings that interest me. so you can -- these people don't have time to do that. that is my work. you can be informed in this country if you work at it, but you do have to work at it. there is no single newspaper you can read, no single magazine that you can read that will give you enough information to try to reach your own opinion about an important subject, but i am still with the big newspapers. they are still trying, new york times lost a lot of column inches. the washington post lost... >> smith: they lost a lot of folks, too. they lost a lot of reporters. >> moyers: there is not enough advertising any longer. >> smith: can you imagine a scenario in which the washington post or the new york times would cease to exist, what that would say about our... >> moyers: it is not just conceivable; it is even feasible. >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: particularly in washington.

>> smith: right. well, we will have public television at least, we hope. you mentioned that public television is sort of the exception to much of what is being discussed, and i want to segue into a conversation about your new program. you are the energizer bunny of media. you just keep going and going and every time we think moyers is off and we are not going to have him back, you pop back up. this program, moyers and company, which is going to be on in january on public television stations all over the country, is... well, let me let you define it. i know what you have said about it, but i want you to tell us yourself what your intention is. >> moyers: on your first, public radio, national public radio, is perhaps, in my judgment, the most important broadcast medium of our time. it is growing. yes, they have their problems, but it reaches more people than, collectively >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: than any other single instrument of journalism. and we must have some information that we know in common, that we share in common, if we are going to feel a part of the same nation. the succession of people

from the sense of, we the people, from the sense of the union, the sense that we are in this boat together, i am in your family tree and you are in my family tree. so we have got to have a sense of nation, a sense of we the people. >> smith: and you think npr provides that? i mean, there are a lot of conservatives that think npr is just essentially a liberal plot. >> moyers: they do think that, but they still, according to the studies, listen to npr more than they would listen to any other medium at the moment. >> smith: they do. >> moyers: they probably listen to npr, those thoughtful conservatives, more than they listen to limbaugh and all of that. but public broadcasting is an alternative to the corporate view of the citizen as consumer. >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: now we are in trouble. our stations around the country are facing real financial austerity as well. >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: losing people, losing broadcasts and all of that. there is no guarantee that we are going to be around, and if we were that is still not enough because even our stations with inadequate budgets cannot

cover, cannot report on what is happening in austin, travis county, central texas. >> smith: indeed. >> moyers: in a way a reporter can, working for you, on your website, or on your online journal. so i, the crisis is here in terms of the kind of journalism we get that enables us independently to decide where our interest as a citizen and our national interests go, and i won't live long enough to see that. i'm coming back with another series because; well, first of all i have no retirement skills. i never have. [ laughter ] >> smith: that is very self-aware. >> moyers: walter cronkite said to me ten years after he had retired... we were in vienna together for one of his great hostings of the vienna symphony orchestra, broadcasted all over the world, a billion viewers every year on new years day with that great symphony. we were having our, we were about to leave vienna the next day and we were having lunch and he said to me, you know, you are smarter than i am. i said, what? come on, walter.

i could see it coming. he said, yeah, you haven't retired. i retired too soon. i retired at 65. i was then 75. you have had another ten years than i have, he said. i said, well, you know, i decided a long time ago watching my father, watching that generation, that retirement is the enemy of longevity. when you have work that is easy like i do, work that is fun like i do, work that i can... you know, journalism has been for me a continuing course in adult education. ever since i went to work at sixteen on the marshall news messenger in marshall, texas, it has been the way i learned about the world and it has constantly enlarged my world. just, it just never seems to stop what you are able to learn as a journalist, and i have been fortunate through the independence that i have achieved with public broadcasting -- i raise every penny of every production i mount to share

my own education with a reasonably large audience. >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: that keeps you going. if you are a teacher, it is so sad when a teacher at 65 has to leave the class because that class, those young people, are pulling that teacher onward to what they know that he doesn't know, and the tension between the generations, of a generation that thinks it knows everything, my generation, and a young generation that thinks it is learning everything that is important that we don't know. that tension is the source of great teaching and of great learning. i had a year at the university of texas. i had wonderful teachers, but they made me a wonderful student by the way that they appealed to me. that is true of an audience as well. >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: and i've had this kind of audience that just keeps wanting to take the next turn in the journey with me, so why give that up? a weekly broadcast takes a toll. >> smith: yeah. >> moyers: but it is rewarding from the letters and also from... you know,

that camera is a means of intimacy, and if you can imagine somebody behind that camera, if you can imagine a campfire behind that camera and people coming in on a friday night and gathering around it, then there is something that pulls from you, a participatory impulse that makes you feel at one. i don't mean to be mystical. it is not mystical. when i started in this business i was very, very formal, not long out of government, publishing newspapers, newsday, and i wore horn-rimmed glasses and i wore a vest. one day my director came out of the studio and he said, you've got to think of some, you've got to be less formal, more casual, think of somebody on the other side of that camera and talk to them. so i could only imagine on the spot that my grandmother, who was then something like 70, 75, and i began to talk to my grandmother. for the next twenty years that is what i did. i finally went to see her. she had moved from oklahoma down to albuquerque, nm. she was dying and i was by

her hospital bed. i said, grandma, i just want to know something. you know all of these years i've been talking to you? she said, really? i said yes, and told her the story i just told you, and i said, it really made a difference to know that you were on the other side of that camera. were you watching? because i didn't know if she was. she said, oh, i never missed you. i said, well, what did you think? and she said, i thought you were so pretty. [laughter] >> smith: she's your grandmother. >> moyers: she's my grandmother. >> smith: mr. moyers, we are out of time. i am sorry. i could sit and talk to you all day, and maybe when the new show is on you could come back around through here. we would love to have you. all right, bill moyers. >> moyers: all right. thank you. >> smith: an honor. [ applause ]

>> funding for overheard with evan smith is provided in part by hillco partners, texas government affairs consultancy and its global health care consulting business unit, hillco health. and by the mattson mchale foundation in support of public television. and also by mfi foundation, improving the quality of life within our community. and also by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation and viewers like you. thank you.