Bill Moyers returned on-air and online in January 2012 with MOYERS & COMPANY, a weekly hour of compelling and vital conversation about life and the state of American democracy, featuring some of the best thinkers of our time. A range of scholars, artists, activists, scientists, philosophers and newsmakers bring context, insight and meaning to important topics.
The series occasionally includes Moyers' own timely and penetrating essays on society and government. In a multimedia marketplace saturated with shallow sound bites and partisan name-calling, MOYERS & COMPANY digs deeper. As the Los Angeles Times put it in 2010, “No one on television has centralized the discussion of ideas as much as Moyers... He not only gives a forum to unusual thinkers, he is truly interested in what they have to say and who they are because he believes their ideas really matter.”
BILL MOYERS ON DEMOCRACY
Bill Moyers’ broadcast commentaries have become an institution in public media. Connecting dots of history, evidence, personal experience, and logic, Moyers shares his honest take on the relevant events and controversies of our times.
MOYERS MOMENTS
Short, curated video clips from both classic and new Moyers broadcasts that are so memorable and meaningful that they deserved to be called out, enjoyed and easily shared.
BOOKS BY BILL MOYERS
Explore books written by Bill Moyers on subjects ranging from poetry to politics.
MONEY AND POLITICS
Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United by Zephyr Teachout
Obama Can Reform Dark Money With a Stroke of a Pen by Lee Fang
Why Government Spends More Per Pupil at Elite Private Universities Than at Public Universities by Robert Reich
In Wisconsin, Dark Money Got a Mining Company What It Wanted by Theodoric Meyer
The Truth Laid Bare by Victoria Bassetti
Groups Call on eBay to Quit ALEC by John Light
Moyers on Big Banks, Ethics and Washington, DC
The Koch Brothers’ War on Transit by Angie Schmitt
Topics for Sunday, November 16, 2014:
In this turbulent midterm election year, two academics decided to practice what they preached. They left the classroom, confronted the reality of down-and-dirty politics, and tried to replace moneyed interests with the public interest. Neither was successful – this year, at least – but on this week’s edition of MOYERS & COMPANY, they discuss with Bill Moyers their experiences and the hard-fought lessons learned about the state of American democracy.
Lawrence Lessig teaches law at Harvard, is director of that university’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and founded the University of Chicago’s Center for Internet and Society. A well-known Internet activist and campaign finance reform advocate, this election cycle, he started Mayday.US, a crowd-funded SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs. Its mission, Lessig says, is to reduce the influence of money in politics and make it politically toxic to oppose campaign finance reform. Lessig’s six congressional picks in truly competitive races went down to defeat in the midterms, but he told a reporter, “The fight to root out corruption in our politics is one of the most important in our time, and we will continue to pursue it with fierce urgency.”
Zephyr Teachout is a professor of constitutional and property law at Fordham Law School and this year became a political candidate – going up against incumbent New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary. She received more than a third of the vote and carried 30 of the state’s 62 counties, surprising everyone – including Cuomo. Her new book, “Corruption in America,” is a history of the corrosive influence of money in politics. In it she writes, “What America now faces, if we do not change the fundamental structures of the relationship of money to legislative power, is neither mob rule nor democracy, but oligarchy.”
Bill Moyers is on Facebook, and you can follow @BillMoyers on Twitter. Miss last week's episode? MOYERS & COMPANY is available for online viewing.
