Bill Moyers, a former press secretary to President Lyndon B. Johnson who turned into a longtime broadcast journalist and champion of public media, has died at age 91, his family confirmed to CNN.
The acclaimed journalist’s son, William Moyers, said he died of complications from a long illness. His wife of nearly 71 years, Judith Davidson Moyers, was by his side.
Moyers, who was once described by Walter Cronkite as “the conscience” of the country, was a public television pioneer, leading multiple installments of “Bill Moyers’ Journal” on PBS stations in the 1970s and again in the late 2000s.
His storied career also included chapters as the publisher of Newsday; a presidential debate moderator; a correspondent at CBS News; and analyst at NBC News.
Through five decades on the air, “he reached the heights of excellence in journalism,” former CNN president Tom Johnson said, noting that many compared Moyers to “the Edward R. Murrow of those times.”
Johnson was an assistant to Moyers during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, when Moyers served as press secretary and one of the most trusted advisors to the president.
Moyers was instrumental in setting up the task forces that led to Johnson’s creation of the Great Society programs of the 1960s.
“At the root of the Great Society was only an idea,” Moyers wrote in his memoir, that “free men and women can work with their government to make things better.”
In a 2019 interview with CNN, Moyers — who was still busy analyzing the news, then at his own website — said that “for the first time in my long life,” he feared for America.
“I was born in the Depression, lived through World War II, have been a part of politics and government for all these years,” he said, before observing that “a society, a democracy can die of too many lies. And we’re getting close to that terminal moment unless we reverse the obsession with lies that are being fed around the country.”
Still, Moyers said, “do facts matter anymore? I think they do.”
Throughout his decades-long career, Moyers received 35 Emmy Awards, two Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia University Awards, nine Peabody Awards and three George Polk Awards. Moyers also received the first-ever Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the American Film Institute.
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