For more than 30 years, Bill Moyers has established a brand of excellence in broadcast journalism. Moyers is one of the chief inheritors of the Edward R. Murrow tradition of “deep-think” journalism. He worked alternately on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the 1970s and early 1980s and has since appeared almost exclusively on PBS, and throughout this career his achievements have been principally in the areas of investigative documentary and long-form conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers. Moyers, who had been a print journalist, an ordained Baptist minister, a press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson, and a newspaper publisher before coming to television in 1970, gained public and private-foundation support to produce some of television’s most incisive investigative documentaries. Each was delivered in the elegantly written and deceptively soft-spoken narrations that came, Moyers has said, out of the storytelling traditions of his east Texas upbringing. Whereas Murrow had taken on Joseph McCarthy on See It Now and the agribusiness industry in his famous Harvest of Shame documentary, Moyers examined the failings of constitutional democracy in his 1974 Essay on Watergate and exposed governmental illegalities and cover-up during the Iran Contra scandal. He has looked at issues of race, class and gender; analyzed the power that media images hold for a nation of “consumers,” not citizens; and explored virtually every aspect of American political, economic, and social life in his documentaries.

Equally influential were Moyers’s World of Ideas series. Again, Murrow had paved the way in his transatlantic conversations with political leaders, thinkers, and artists on his Small World program in the late 1950s, but Moyers used his own gentle, probing style to talk to a remarkable range of articulate intellectuals on his two foundation-supported interview series on PBS. In discussions that ranged from an hour to, in the case of mythology scholar Joseph Campbell, six hours on the air, Moyers brought to television what he called the “conversation of democracy.” He spoke with such social critics as Noam Chomsky and Cornel West; writers such as Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, Mexican poet and novelist Carlos Fuentes, and American novelist Toni Morrison; and social analysts including philosopher Mortimer Adler and University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson. Moyers engaged voices and ideas that had been seldom if ever heard on television, and, in many instances, the transcribed versions of his series became best-selling books as well (The Power of Myth, 1988; The Secret Government, 1988; A World of Ideas, 1989; A World of Ideas II, 1990, Healing and the Mind, 1992). Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth was on the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year and sold 750,000 copies within the first four years of its publication.

Moyers’s television work has been as prolific as his publishing record. In all, he produced more than 600 hours of programming (filmed and videotaped conversations and documentaries) between 1971 and 1989, which comes out to 33 hours of programming a year, or the equivalent of more than half an hour of programming a week for 18 years. Moyers broadcast another 125 programs between 1989 and 1992, working with a series of producers—27 of them on the first two World of Ideas series alone. He formed his own company, Public Affairs Television, in 1986 and began to distribute his own shows.

By the early 1990s, Moyers had established himself as a significant figure of television talk, his power and influence providing him access to corridors of power and policy. In January 1992, he was invited for a rare overnight visit with president-elect Bill Clinton to discuss the nation’s problems before the Clinton inaugural. A survey of the video holdings of a single large state university at the end of the 1990s showed almost 100 holdings bearing Moyers’s name. By this time, he had also received 67 prizes and awards in recognition of his work.

Working closely with his wife, Judith Davidson, as creative collaborator and president of the Public Affairs Television production company, Moyers has continued his prolific output into the 21st century. In January 2002, he began hosting a new weekly PBS series, Now with Bill Moyers, which covers stories from angles and with the kind of perspectives and depth that viewers have come to expect from this veteran writer, publisher, and broadcast journalist.

Over his long career, Moyers has become one of the few broadcast journalists who might be said to approach the stature of Murrow. If Murrow founded broadcast journalism, then Moyers has significantly extended its traditions.