How David Horowitz Helped Expose ‘Liberal Fraud’ Bill Moyers

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“Bill Moyers, the onetime White House Press Secretary and newspaper publisher who spent four decades as a respected broadcast journalist and documentarian for PBS and CBS, died Thursday,” the Hollywood Reporter explained last month. For the real story, dial it back to  “The Power of Myth,” by Andrew Ferguson in the August 18, 1991 issue of The New Republic (TNR) subtitled “Bill Moyers, liberal fraud.”

PBS boss Jennifer Lawson, was hailing Moyers as a “national treasure.” Jackie Onassis called him one of her heroes and Barbara Jordan wanted him to run for president. Lyndon Johnson called Moyers “my vice president in charge of everything,” and as Ferguson discovered, that was indeed the case:

According to classified documents unearthed by the Church Committee on intelligence abuses in 1976, and others obtained by David Garrow for his The FBI and Martin Luther King (1981), while at the White House Moyers tracked the bureau’s infamous campaign against King. The surveillance, begun under Kennedy, was broadened under Johnson. . .

As the campaign against King progressed, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover routinely forwarded to the White House summaries of the King wiretaps, which were placed not only in King’s home and office but also in his hotel rooms around the country. The summaries covered not only King’s dealings with associates but also his sexual activities. After receiving one such summary, Moyers instructed the FBI to disseminate it widely throughout the executive branch, to Dean Rusk. Robert McNamara, Carl Rowan, and many others. Moyers was also aware at the time of Hoover’s efforts to leak the King material to the press.

In 1986, after a stint with CBS, Moyers formed his own production company, Public Affairs Television, Inc. (PAT) By 1991 PAT had produced 136 hours of television, and as Ferguson discovered:

The flow of funds within the hermetic world of public TV is one of its tightest secrets. (Though government-funded, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.) Moyers himself says only, “I’ve been lucky. I’ve always made a nice living.”

Moyers draws the bulk of his funding from two sources: mostly left-leaning tax-exempt foundations and corporate sponsors. Since tax-exempt foundations are forbidden by law from supporting for-profit enterprises, the money is given to a middleman–in Moyers’s case, usually WNET “in support of” particular programming.” The middleman then contracts with the production company to produce the shows.

Moyers bagged big bucks from television tie-ins, books and tapes adapted from broadcast shows such as “The Power of Myth,” with new-age guru Joseph Campbell. That fell afoul of Larry Adelman, a veteran of the public broadcasting establishment, who told Ferguson the program itself becomes “an ideal commercial” for the aftermarket sales. Moyers claimed that “not a lot” of money was involved, but Ferguson didn’t buy it:

As the Los Angeles-based watchdog group COMINT has documented, the Campbell series has sold a whopping 200,000 cassettes through PBS Video, which pays a royalty of at least 30 percent (Movers splits royalties with his two co-producers). “A Gathering of Men” has sold at least 48,000 units, at a price of $39.95. The cheaper “Amazing Grace,” another Moyers show, has sold 48,000. The books also do well. Seven Locks Press sold more than 40,000 copies of a spin-off from “The Secret Government,” one of Moyers’s Iran-contra shows, with Moyers again sharing royalties with his co-producer.

COMINT was a project of the Center For the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), which David Horowitz established after the Second Thoughts Conference in 1987, and where this writer served as a journalism fellow. At  CSPC we dug into PBS and National Public Radio, reliable mouthpieces of the left.

David thought a better venue for Moyers would be The New Republic, known as a liberal publication. In those days, a liberal was someone you could disagree with amiably, and no-conservative was a liberal who had “mugged by reality,” as Irving Kristol put it.  The COMINT material helped Ferguson make his case, and he knew how to stick the landing:

Moyers taps the public trough through tax-free foundations and tax-write-off corporate donations, and a government-subsidized network whose devotion to him is boundless. And whereas [Pat] Robertson’s religion relies on a historical tradition and common text against which it can be measured and criticized, the spiritualism that Moyers has lately been retailing comprehends only the unfalsifiable whims of pop shrinks, elastic and malleable. Neither, it’s safe to say, is a credible guide for politics or life. To the apolitical among us Bill Moyers is an Elmer Gantry of the New Age. To the Democrats, he is a Henry Wallace for the 1990s.

The piece infuriated Moyers, who spent $9,000 on a TNR ad in response. The  “national treasure” never ran for president and even liberals began to view him as a partisan Democrat and shameless profiteer.

The Center for the Study of Popular Culture became the David Horowitz Freedom Center and its flagship publication, Heterodoxy, became Frontpage Magazine. David Horowitz passed away in April at the age of 85, and for his story see Radical Son. Not a dollar of public money was involved in Radical Son’s publication, nor in any of the best-sellers David wrote with Peter Collier, who passed away in 2019.

Rest in peace, brave warriors.