“Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it’s time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.” – Bill Moyers
I’m writing this on June 26, 2025 and Bill Moyers died today. Perhaps it’s strange to use my first of hopefully many future netspiels’ to eulogize a respected journalist, but the moment I heard the news, I couldn’t help but to start typing.
I was the kind of nerdy kid who loved staying up late to watch documentaries on PBS: Frontline, Nova, Rick Steves’ Europe, anything by Ken Burns, a voracious consumer of thoughtful, informative, if sometimes dry media. In fact, growing up in the post-Columbine, post-9/11 era, I suspect the dryness was part of the appeal. Other sources of information were becoming rapidly more sensationalist, focused more on drawing eyeballs than providing thorough investigative reporting or historical context. Public media offered me a place to slow my mind down, to ingest and understand information, to engage my curiosity without stoking fear or anger or righteousness.
Bill Moyers was already a gray-haired old legend by the time I started watching him regularly on Moyers & Company, though I first encountered him on the page, in the transcribed version of The Power of Myth: his seminal interview with folklorist and scholar Joseph Campbell. That book changed how I viewed the world and started me on a spiritual journey that has yet to meet its end.
While Campbell was the subject of the interview, expounding on his theories about the monomyth and the functions of mythology on our lives, I was equally engrossed by Moyers, who asked unexpected questions, opening up new veins through which the conversation could become deeper and richer in substance. Watching the televised version of the interview, you can see Moyers at work, his curiosity almost child-like with wonder, yet also the picture of a professional journalist who has studied his subject with care and attention. He nimbly guides the conversation, acting as a stand-in for the viewer, challenging Campbell to go further but always giving him time to expound upon his thoughts. More than anything, Moyers listens.
I suspect that’s what drew me to him. No matter who he spoke with, whether it be Jimmy Carter or Maya Angelou or Elie Wiesel or the Stanleys and the Neumann’s – two families struggling with poverty that he started following in the 90’s – Moyers offered his undivided attention. I can’t speak for the man, but there was always a sense that he truly liked people, that he respected their human dignity regardless of their status, class, race or gender. It could feel as though he was in a race to tell as many human stories as possible in the time he had on Earth and more importantly, to let others tell their own stories. In his eighties he started a podcast, in his nineties, despite his failing health, he made one more Emmy-nominated documentary – Two American Families – about the Stanley’s and the Neumann’s, that released just last year. Perhaps I saw some of my own curiosity in his approach to journalism, my own desire to engage in good conversation and shared humanity.
I’m not a biographer and could not begin to recount the history of a man so dynamic and generous. Suffice to say, Bill Moyers did not just live within a democracy, he lived a democratic life. Working in the John F. Kennedy administration, he helped find the first funding for the Peace Corps. Under President Johnson, he served as White House Press Secretary as well as on the original commission that advocated for the creation of public, non-commercial, educational television. He was a critical voice in the founding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and thus crucial to all those late night documentaries I loved so much.
As a journalist, at CBS, NBC and eventually PBS, he covered every subject under the sun, from Watergate to the Rosedale Bombings to Iran-Contra and the War in Iraq. Perhaps more importantly, he allowed himself to stray into topics outside of politics and current affairs, demonstrating the importance of covering history, art, literature, nature, religion, even morality. His specials were often deep-dives into complex ideas and subject matter, bravely discussing even the most controversial topics while simultaneously sharing sources of meaning and joy.
As a keen listener and observer, Moyers gained wisdom and perspective that he was unafraid to share. While his reporting was always fair, he did not seek balance so much as truth – and was always willing to speak that truth. As early 2003, almost ten years before Occupy Wall Street and before most people had ever heard of Bernie Sanders, he was reporting on the growing inequality in America, stating “The rich are getting richer, which arguably wouldn’t matter if the rising tide lifted all boats…the inequality gap is the widest it’s been since 1929; the middle class is besieged and the working poor are barely keeping their heads above water.” He was also thorough in his criticism of the expanding corporate influence on the free press, money in politics, the lies that led to the Iraq War, the cost of healthcare and a myriad of other causes that make him seem as much like an oracle as a newsman. Many of the conversations about society’s ills that we have today were started by Bill Moyers.
For this reason, he could have (and often was) accused of bias. But bias in the service of truth is a defense against lies. His perspective, his insight bore out more than not. Moyers understood America in a way that many others couldn’t or wouldn’t and the country he leaves behind still faces the problems he highlighted, sometimes exacerbated by our collective refusal to heed his warnings. All journalists are biased. Bill was upfront about his own. The one’s you shouldn’t trust are the one’s who claim fairness and balance in spite of their own obvious opinions.
Moyers leaves behind an unparalleled body of work, much of it as relevant today as it was when it first aired. He may not be as well known, especially by younger generations, but I will always think of Bill in the way that my parents think of Walter Kronkite and Edward R. Murrow. He was a voice we could trust and his loss is profound. He defended democracy and the beauty of the human spirit until his very last breath. We’re all better for having lived in the world with Bill Moyers and he has certainly earned his rest.
I’m not a journalist, nor do I hope to be. But I suspect the reason that Mr. Moyer’s death motivated me to start writing tonight is because we value so many of the same things: curiosity, objective truth, listening, observing, telling the stories of common people, sharing art and ideas that move the soul, celebrating that which makes us human and connects us together. Bill taught me to thirst not just for knowledge, but for understanding and enrichment.
Netspiel is a project dedicated to these same ideals. I believe in human thriving, even in an era that seems designed for us to dehumanize each other and ourselves. The challenges we face can be defeated, but only if we speak about them honestly and only if we give ourselves a space to talk about new ideas and old ideas and to revel in the things we love. This space is still shapeless at this point, but I hope you’ll join me as I sculpt away to find its form – whatever that may be.
For now, consider donating to PBS in memory of Bill Moyers. Threatened with defunding, it needs our help now more than ever. I promise, if you comb their library, you’ll learn something new.
Yours,
Rob the Protopian Punk
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