Journalism Under Fire

Editor's Note: This speech was given by Bill Moyers at a Society of Professional Journalists conference on Sept. 11, 2004.

Thank you for inviting me to share this occasion with you. Three months from now I will be retiring from active journalism and I cannot imagine a better turn into the home stretch than this morning with you.

My life in journalism began 54 years ago, on my 16th birthday, in the summer before my junior year in high school, when I went to work as a cub reporter for the Marshall News Messenger in the East Texas town of 20,000 where I had grown up. Early on, I got one of those lucky breaks that define a life's course. Some of the old timers were sick or on vacation and Spencer Jones, the managing editor, assigned me to help cover the Housewives' Rebellion. Fifteen women in town refused to pay the Social Security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They argued that social security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that – here's my favorite part – "requiring us to collect (the tax) is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage." They hired a lawyer – Martin Dies, the former Congressman notorious for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities – but to no avail. The women wound up holding their noses and paying the tax. In the meantime the Associated Press had picked up our coverage and turned the rebellion into a national story. One day after it was all over, the managing editor called me over and pointed to the ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a "Notice to the Editor" citing one Bill Moyers and the News Messenger for the reporting we had done on the rebellion. I was hooked.

Looking back on that experience and all that followed, I often think of what Joseph Lelyveld told aspiring young journalists when he was executive editor of the New York Times . "You can never know how a life in journalism will turn out," he said. "Decide that you want to be a scholar, a lawyer, or a doctor...and your path to the grave is pretty well laid out before you. Decide that you want to enter our rather less reputable line of work and you set off on a route that can sometimes seem to be nothing but diversions, switchbacks and a life of surprises...with the constant temptation to keep reinventing yourself."

So I have. My path led me on to graduate school, a detour through seminary, then to LBJ's side in Washington, and, from there, through circumstances so convoluted I still haven't figured them out, back to journalism, first at Newsday and then the big leap from print to television, to PBS and CBS and back again – just one more of those vagrant journalistic souls who, intoxicated with the moment is always looking for the next high: the lead not yet written, the picture not yet taken, the story not yet told.

It took me awhile after I left government to get my footing back in journalism. I had to learn all over again that what's important for the journalist is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality. I've seen plenty of reality. Journalism took me to famine and revolution in Africa and to war in Central America; it took me to the bedside of the dying and delivery rooms of the newborn. It took me into the lives of inner-city families in Newark and working-class families in Milwaukee struggling to find their place in the new global economy. CBS News paid me richly to put in my two cents worth on just about anything that happened on a given day. As a documentary journalist I've explored everything from the power of money in politics to how to make a poem. I've investigated the abuse of power in the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals and the unanswered questions of 9/11. I've delved into the "Mystery of Chi" in Chinese traditional medicine as well as the miracle that empowered a one-time slave trader to write the hymn, "Amazing Grace." Journalism has been a continuing course in adult education – my own; other people paid the tuition and travel, and I've never really had to grow up and get a day job. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I've enjoyed the company of colleagues as good as they come, who kept inspiring me to try harder.