HOLLYWOOD — To say that Bill Moyers doesn't care what Bill O'Reilly says about him would not be true. Moyers did, after all, buy an ad in the New York Daily News to respond to what he believes were scurrilous charges by the Fox News Channel talk-show host.
It would, however, be accurate to say that Moyers doesn't exactly have a lot of respect for O'Reilly.
"You'll have to ask him why he attacked me. I was surprised by his attack. I wasn't watching when he issued it. I don't watch Bill O'Reilly. He's not a factor — no pun intended — in my life." (Essentially, O'Reilly accused Moyers of profiting from taxpayer support of PBS and using donations to win himself a journalism award — charges Moyers had already effectively refuted.)
Not that Moyers heard what O'Reilly had to say first-hand. "Some people told me about it, but even then, I paid very little attention to it. It was when he wrote his syndicated column, in which he committed several untruths, that I felt it was important to answer him."
Moyers said he asked the New York Daily News for space to respond. The News offered him the standard space ("I think it's 125 words"), and Moyers felt "that wasn't enough." So he bought an ad in the paper for a more lengthy response.
"I didn't attack him, but I answered the false statements he made about me. That was the end of it as far as I'm concerned. I understand that he continued on some of the broadcasts after that and on his radio show. I find that unfortunate."
Moyers wasn't surprised when TV critics asked him about his contretemps with O'Reilly, but he had no interest in extending what he believed to be O'Reilly's efforts to draw attention to himself. "He asked me on his show, and I declined for the simple reason that I do not believe journalism is about journalists attacking each other. I believe the stories we tell are more important than we are. I believe the world is more interesting than we are. And I think it's a disservice to our public to be engaging in personal feuds."
He scoffs at charges by O'Reilly and others at the Fox News Channel and elsewhere that he or anyone at PBS is pushing a liberal agenda. "I think that is the mantra that Fox and others on the right have been peddling for a long time now to cause people to distrust mainstream news and to dislike public broadcasting."
And Moyers maintains there's no facts behind such assertions by O'Reilly and other conservatives. "Well, I would say they're not watching 'Now' and they're not watching 'Frontline' and they're not watching 'The NewsHour' and they're not watching 'Washington Week in Review.' I mean, the one thing I would have asked Bill O'Reilly if I had gone on his show is what broadcast of mine did he see that triggered his tantrum? My hunch is he doesn't watch 'Now with Bill Moyers.'
"I really do believe that the journalists I do know in public broadcasting try to ground their journalism in journalistic ethos. We are not ideologues. Ideologues look at the world a certain way and try to shape everything to fit that view of the world. I take my opinions and my views from the world as I find it. And the question is — is it impossible to state the reported truth on public broadcasting without being accused of being biased? I don't know."
Not that Moyers himself doesn't have strong reservations about the state of broadcast journalism. "I think that increasingly, as commercial and corporate journalism have turned more and more to celebrity and entertainment values, it's left a very big opening of what public television does. . . . And I just wish there were more of us, because I think all of the public-television public-affairs programs are dealing with the world in a more realistic way than corporate journalism.
"There is still some very good journalism being done in commercial television, but it's increasingly committed to trivia, nonsense and violence, frankly."
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com