Bill Moyers: "What is important for the journalist is not how close you are to power, but how close you are to reality"

i have few personal heroes... bill moyers is one of them...

From Bill Moyers' acceptance speech for the The Ridenhour Courage Prize on April 3, 2008.

[W]hat is important for the journalist is not how close you are to power, but how close you are to reality.

[...]

I ... had to learn one of journalism's basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. We journalists are of course obliged to cover the news, but our deeper mission is to uncover the news that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden.

Unless you are willing to fight and re-fight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you've got it right, and then take all of the slings and arrows directed at you by the powers that be -- corporate and political and sometimes journalistic -- there is no use even trying. You have to love it and I do. I.F. Stone once said, after years of catching the government's lies and contradictions, "I have so much fun, I ought to be arrested." Journalism 101.

in one of the last columns from dear, departed molly ivins, she beseeched bill moyers to run for president... she admitted that he probably wouldn't stand a chance of being elected, but that he was the only person she knew who would dramatically increase the integrity and moral tenor of the race simply by being IN it... i couldn't agree more...

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