.jpg)
 color.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.svg)
An essay is a short piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition of an essay is vague, overlapping with those of an article and a short story. Almost all modern essays are written in prose, but works in verse have been dubbed essays (e.g. Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous works like John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population provide counterexamples.
In some countries (e.g., in the United States), essays have become a major part of formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and admission essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants and, in the humanities and social sciences, as a way of assessing the performance of students during final exams. The concept of an "essay" has been extended to other mediums beyond writing. A film essay is a movie that often incorporates documentary film making styles and which focuses more on the evolution of a theme or an idea. A photographic essay is an attempt to cover a topic with a linked series of photographs; it may or may not have an accompanying text or captions.
It is difficult to define the genre into which essays fall. Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, gives guidance on the subject. He notes that "Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything, usually on a certain topic. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay". He points out that "a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel"--he gives Montaigne's Third Book as an example. Huxley argues on several occasions that "essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference".
Huxley's three poles are:
]]
The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, "to try" or "to attempt". In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was the first author to describe his work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as "attempts" to put his thoughts into writing, and his essays grew out of his commonplacing. Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Oeuvres Morales (Moral works) into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life he continued revising previously published essays and composing new ones. Francis Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
In countries like the United States, essays have become a major part of a formal education. Secondary students in these countries are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills, and essays are often used by universities in these countries in selecting applicants (see admissions essay). In both secondary and tertiary education, essays are used to judge the mastery and comprehension of material. Students are asked to explain, comment on, or assess a topic of study in the form of an essay. During some courses, university students will often be required to complete one or more essays that are prepared over several weeks or months. In addition, in fields such as the humanities and social sciences, mid-term and end of term examinations often require students to write a short essay in two or three hours.
In these countries, so-called academic essays, which may also be called "papers", are usually more formal than literary ones. They may still allow the presentation of the writer's own views, but this is done in a logical and factual manner, with the use of the first person often discouraged. Longer academic essays (often with a word limit of between 2,000 and 5,000 words) are often more discursive. They sometimes begin with a short summary analysis of what has previously been written on a topic, which is often called a literature review.
Longer essays may also contain an introductory page in which words and phrases from the title are tightly defined. Most academic institutions will require that all substantial facts, quotations, and other porting material used in an essay be referenced in a bibliography or works cited page at the end of the text. This scholarly convention allows others (whether teachers or fellow scholars) to understand the basis of the facts and quotations used to support the essay's argument, and thereby help to evaluate to what extent the argument is supported by evidence, and to evaluate the quality of that evidence. The academic essay tests the student's ability to present their thoughts in an organized way and is designed to test their intellectual capabilities.
One essay guide of a US university makes the distinction between research papers and discussion papers. The guide states that a "research paper is intended to uncover a wide variety of sources on a given topic". As such, research papers "tend to be longer and more inclusive in their scope and with the amount of information they deal with." While discussion papers "also include research, ...they tend to be shorter and more selective in their approach...and more analytical and critical". Whereas a research paper would typically quote "a wide variety of sources", a discussion paper aims to integrate the material in a broader fashion.
One of the challenges facing US universities is that in some cases, students may submit essays which have been purchased from an essay mill (or "paper mill") as their own work. An "essay mill" is a ghostwriting service that sells pre-written essays to university and college students. Since plagiarism is a form of academic dishonesty or academic fraud, universities and colleges may investigate papers suspected to be from an essay mill by using Internet plagiarism detection software, which compares essays against a database of known mill essays and by orally testing students on the contents of their papers.
A KSA, or Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities, is a series of narrative statements that are required when applying to Federal government job openings in the United States. KSAs are used along with resumes to determine who the best applicants are when several candidates qualify for a job. The knowledge, skills and abilities necessary for the successful performance of a position are contained on each job vacancy announcement. KSAs are brief and focused essays about one's career and educational background that presumably qualify one to perform the duties of the position being applied for.
An Executive Core Qualification, or ECQ, is a narrative statement that is required when applying to Senior Executive Service positions within the US Federal government. Like the KSAs, ECQs are used along with resumes to determine who the best applicants are when several candidates qualify for a job. The Office of Personnel Management has established five executive core qualifications that all applicants seeking to enter the Senior Executive Service must demonstrate.
The genre is not well-defined but might include works of early Soviet parliamentarians like Dziga Vertov, present-day filmmakers like Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, Michael Moore (Roger and Me, Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11), Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line), or Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me: A Film of Epic Proportions). Jean-Luc Godard describes his recent work as "film-essays". Two filmmakers whose work was the antecedent to the cinematic essay include George Melies and Bertolt Brecht. Georges Melies did a film about the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 which mixes actual footage with shots of a recreation of the event. Bertolt Brecht was a playwright who experimented with film and incorporated film projections into some of his plays.
David Winks Gray's article "The essay film in action" states that the "essay film became an identifiable form of film making in the 1950s and ’60s". He states that since that time, essay films have tended to be "on the margins" of the film making world. Essay films have a "peculiar searching, questioning tone" which is "between documentary and fiction" but without "fitting comfortably" into either genre. Gray notes that just like written essays, essay films "tend to marry the personal voice of a guiding narrator (often the director) with a wide swath of other voices". The University of Wisconsin Cinematheque website echoes some of Gray's comments; it calls film essays an "intimate and allusive" genre that "catches filmmakers in a pensive mood, ruminating on the margins between fiction and documentary" in a manner that is "refreshingly inventive, playful, and idiosyncratic".
Category:School terminology Category:Writing
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Stephen Brunt |
|---|---|
| Birth date | March 20, 1959 |
| Birth place | Hamilton, Ontario |
| Occupation | Newspaper Columnist and Sports Broadcaster |
| Gender | Male |
| Credits | Globe and Mail |
The station flopped out of the gate earning 0.7% of the male 25 to 49 market share (compared to the Fan 590's 4.6% share in the mornings and 6.4% on the afternoon drive show), which of course made it difficult to attach a cost to advertising or attracting advertisers. Just one year after the launch the ratings showed little improvement at 0.9% in the male 25 to 49 demographic.
His other works include: The Way it Looks from Here: Contemporary Canadian Writing on Sports; Mean Business: The Rise and Fall of Shawn O'Sullivan; Second to None: The Roberto Alomar Story (which he famously wrote in a month) and Diamond Dreams: 20 Years of Blue Jays Baseball
Brunt “This is a commercial endeavor. The torch relay, God love it, which is going to make people tear up and is a lovely thing, and a way of including people in the Olympic process, is sponsored. And it is corporate and underwritten. And spots were sold as part of the sponsorship package... This is all part of the machinery of the Olympic Games.” :“You don’t see an ethics problem?” asked Bob McCown. :“No,” Brunt said, “because nobody is telling me what to say or what to do.”
The issue quickly subsided as it became clear a wide variety of people were to carry the torch, including 25 other journalists from the Olympic Consortium.
Category:Canadian sportswriters Category:Canadian television sportscasters Category:Canadian radio sportscasters Category:People from Hamilton, Ontario Category:University of Western Ontario alumni Category:Living people Category:1959 births
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Sarah Vowell |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Sarah Jane Vowell |
| Birth date | (age 41) |
| Birth place | Muskogee, Oklahoma |
Vowell is part Cherokee (about 1/8th on her mother’s side and 1/16th on her father’s side). According to Vowell, “Being at least a little Cherokee in northeastern Oklahoma is about as rare and remarkable as being a Michael Jordan fan in Chicago.” She retraced the path of the forced removal of the Cherokee from the southeastern United States to Oklahoma known as the Trail of Tears with her twin sister Amy. This American Life chronicled her story on July 4, 1998, devoting the entire hour to Sarah's work.
Vowell is the president of the board of 826NYC, a nonprofit tutoring and writing center for students aged 6–18 in Brooklyn.
Her book Assassination Vacation (2005) is a haunting and hilarious road trip to tourist sites devoted to the murders of presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. Vowell examines what these acts of political violence reveal about our national character and our contemporary society.
She is also the author of two essay collections, The Partly Cloudy Patriot (2002) and Take the Cannoli (2000). Her first book (1997), is her year-long diary of listening to the radio in 1995.
Her writing has been published in The Village Voice, Esquire, GQ, Spin, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the SF Weekly, and she has been a regular contributor to the online magazine Salon. She was one of the original contributors to McSweeney’s, also participating in many of the quarterly’s readings and shows.
In 2005, Vowell served as a guest columnist for The New York Times during several weeks in July, briefly filling in for Maureen Dowd. Vowell also served as a guest columnist in February 2006, and again in April 2006.
In 2008, Vowell contributed an essay about Montana to the book .
Vowell's most recent work, Unfamiliar Fishes, which will be released in March 2011, is about the events leading up to the American annexation of Hawaii in 1898.
In April 2006, Vowell served as the keynote speaker at the 27th Annual Kentucky Women Writers Conference. In August and September 2006, she toured the United States as part of the Revenge Of The Book Eaters national tour, which benefits the children's literacy centers 826NYC, 826CHI, 826 Valencia, 826LA, 826 Michigan, and 826 Seattle.
Vowell also provided commentary in Robert Wuhl's 2005 Assume the Position HBO specials.
In 2004, Vowell provided the voice of Violet Parr, the shy teenager in the Brad Bird-directed Pixar animated film The Incredibles and reprised her role for the various related video games and Disney on Ice presentations featuring The Incredibles. The makers of The Incredibles discovered Vowell from episode 81 – Guns of This American Life, where she and her father fire a homemade cannon. Pixar made a test animation for Violet using audio from that sequence, which is included on the DVD version of The Incredibles. She also wrote and was featured in Vowellet: An Essay by Sarah Vowell included on the DVD version of The Incredibles, where she reflects on the differences between being super hero Violet and being an author of history books on the subject of assassinated presidents, and what it means to her nephew Owen.
Vowell provided commentary in "Murder at the Fair: The Assassination of President McKinley", which is part of the History Channel miniseries, 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America.
She is featured prominently in the They Might Be Giants documentary Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns). She also participated on the DVD commentary for the movie, along with the film's director and They Might Be Giants' John Linnell and John Flansburgh.
In September 2006, Vowell appeared as a minor character in the ABC drama Six Degrees. She appeared on an episode of HBO's Bored to Death, as an interviewer in a bar. In 2010, Vowell appeared briefly in the film Please Give, as a shopper.
Category:1969 births Category:School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni Category:American columnists Category:American essayists Category:American journalists Category:American travel writers Category:American voice actors Category:American atheists Category:Living people Category:Montana State University alumni Category:Native American writers Category:Writers from New York Category:Actors from Oklahoma Category:Writers from Oklahoma Category:People from Manhattan Category:People from Muskogee, Oklahoma Category:This American Life personalities Category:Twin people from the United States
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Jeremiah Wright |
|---|---|
| Caption | White House Prayer Breakfast, 1998 |
| Birth name | Jeremiah Alvesta Wright, Jr. |
| Birth date | September 22, 1941 |
| Birth place | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
Following retirement, Wright's beliefs and preaching were scrutinized when segments from his sermons were publicized in connection with the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, including his contention that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were proof that "America's chickens are coming home to roost" and "...not God Bless America. God damn America." Obama reacted to the Wright controversy in a speech entitled "A More Perfect Union."
Wright subsequently defended himself in a speech before the NAACP on April 27, 2008, in which he indicated that he was not "divisive" but "descriptive," and that the black church experience, like black culture, was "different" but not "deficient". After the election, Wright was again the center of controversy when he suggested on one occasion "them Jews" were keeping him from reaching President Obama.
Wright graduated from the Central High School of Philadelphia in 1959, among the best schools in the area at the time. The 211th class yearbook described Wright as a respected member of the class. "Always ready with a kind word, Jerry is one of the most congenial members of the 211,” the yearbook said. “His record in Central is a model for lower class [younger] members to emulate." (A letter of thanks on behalf of the President is superimposed on photo).]]
From 1959 to 1961, Wright attended Virginia Union University, Wright was then trained as a cardiopulmonary technician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Wright was assigned as part of the medical team charged with care of President Lyndon B. Johnson (see photo of Wright caring for Johnson after his 1966 surgery). Before leaving the position in 1967, the White House Physician, Vice Admiral Burkley, personally wrote Wright a letter of thanks on behalf of the United States President.
In 1967 Wright enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1968 and a master’s degree in English in 1969. He also earned a master's degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School.
His wife is Ramah Reed Wright, and he has four daughters, Janet Marie Moore, Jeri Lynne Wright, Nikol D. Reed and Jamila Nandi Wright, and one son, Nathan D. Reed.
Wright, who began the "Ministers in Training" ("M.I.T.") program at Trinity United Church of Christ, has been a national leader in promoting theological education and the preparation of seminarians for the African-American church. The church's mission statement is based upon systematized Black liberation theology that started with the works of James Hal Cone.
Wright has been a professor at Chicago Theological Seminary, Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary and other educational institutions. Wright has served on the Board of Trustees of Virginia Union University, Chicago Theological Seminary and City Colleges of Chicago. He has also served on the Board Directors of Evangelical Health Systems, the Black Theology Project, the Center for New Horizons and the Malcolm X School of Nursing, and on boards and committees of other religious and civic organizations. Having attended Wright's sermon, Barack Obama later adapted Wright's phrase "audacity to hope" to "audacity of hope" which became the title for his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address, and the title of his second book.
On June 9, 2009, in an interview with the Daily Press of Newport News, Wright indicated that he hadn't had contact with Obama up to that point because "Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter, that he'll talk to me in five years when he's a lame duck, or in eight years when he's out of office." Wright also suggested that Obama did not send a delegation to the Durban Review Conference in Geneva on racism because of Zionist pressure saying: "[T]he Jewish vote, the A-I-P-A-C vote, that’s controlling him, that would not let him send representation to the Darfur Review Conference, that’s talking this craziness on this trip, cause they’re Zionists, they would not let him talk to someone who calls a spade what it is." On June 11, 2009, Wright amended his remarks during an interview with Mark Thompson on his radio program, Make it Plain. “Let me say like Hillary, I misspoke. Let me just say: Zionists... I’m not talking about all Jews, all people of the Jewish faith, I’m talking about Zionists."
Wright wrote on his Facebook page apologizing for his remarks on June 12, 2008. He wrote, "I mis-spoke and I sincerely meant no harm or ill-will to the American Jewish community or the Obama administration... I have great respect for the Jewish faith and the foundational (and central) part of our Judeo-Christian tradition." "In other words," another Atlantic writer, Jeffrey Goldberg, alleged, "[H]e regrets speaking plainly instead of deploying a euphemism." The Anti Defamation League released a statement condemning Wright's remarks as "inflammatory and false. The notions of Jewish control of the White House in Reverend Wright's statement express classic anti-Semitism in its most vile form."
Wright has written several books and is featured on Wynton Marsalis's album The Majesty of the Blues, where he recites a spoken word piece written by Stanley Crouch, and on the Odyssey Channel series Great Preachers.
;Sermons
Category:1941 births Category:Living people Category:African American religious leaders Category:American Christian clergy Category:United Church of Christ Category:United Church of Christ members Category:Barack Obama Category:Liberation theologians Category:Howard University alumni Category:University of Chicago alumni Category:Virginia Union University alumni Category:United States Marines Category:United States Navy sailors Category:People from Chicago, Illinois Category:People from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Category:Valparaiso University alumni
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Molly Ivins |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Mary Tyler Ivins |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Birth date | August 30, 1944 |
| Birth place | Monterey, California |
| Death date | |
| Death cause | Inflammatory breast cancer |
| Death place | Austin, Texas |
After graduating from Columbia, she took a job in the Twin Cities at the Minneapolis Tribune, where she covered "militant blacks, angry Indians, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers."
In 1970 Ivins left the Tribune for Austin, Texas to be the co-editor and political reporter for the Texas Observer. She covered the Texas Legislature and befriended folklorist John Henry Faulk, Secretary of State Bob Bullock and future Governor Ann Richards, among others. She also gained increasing national attention through op-ed and feature stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post along with a busy speaking schedule inside and outside Texas. and she wrote for the Times until 1982. During her run there, Ivins became Rocky Mountain bureau chief, covering nine western states, although the writer was known to say she was named chief because there was no one else in the bureau. Ivins also wrote the obituary for Elvis Presley in The New York Times for the August 17, 1977 edition. Generally, her more colorful writing style clashed with the editors' expectations, and in 1980, after she wrote about a "community chicken-killing festival" in New Mexico and called it a "gang-pluck," she was recalled to New York as punishment. When Abe Rosenthal, editor of the Times, accused her of trying to inspire readers to think "dirty thoughts" with these words, her response was, "Damn if I could fool you, Mr. Rosenthal." One friend saw her rebellion against the Times authority structure as a continuation of her rebellion against her father's authority.
In 1995, humorist Florence King wrote in a The American Enterprise column that Ivins had plagiarized King's work and mis-stated a quotation from a King column in a 1988 Mother Jones article. David Rubien, writing in Salon, described the incident: "In a 1995 article for Mother Jones on Southern manners and mores, she extensively quoted, with affectionate attribution, statements from Florence King's book Southern Ladies and Gentlemen. But for some careless reason Ivins still fails to comprehend, she left the attribution off a few King statements." Ivins wrote a letter of apology to King, but characteristically ended it with:"...boy you really are a mean bitch, aren't you? Sincerely, Molly Ivins, plagiarist." King published Ivins's apology and her own reply in a later article.
After her death, George W. Bush, a frequent target of her barbs, said in a statement, "I respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words. She fought her illness with that same passion. Her quick wit and commitment will be missed."
Practice, practice, practice, that's what Texas provides when it comes to sleaze and stink. Who can forget such great explanations as "Well, I'll just make a little bit of money, I won't make a whole lot"? And "There was never a Bible in the room"?In 2003, she coined the term "Great Liberal Backlash of 2003," and was a passionate critic of the 2003 Iraq War. She is also credited with applying the nickname "Shrub" to George W. Bush.
"We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war...We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'" (from her last column)
"Having breast cancer is massive amounts of no fun. First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you. I have been on blind dates better than that."
"So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was."—quoted by John Nichols for The Nation Original source: "The Fun's in the Fight" column for Mother Jones, 1993.
On Bill Clinton: "If left to my own devices, I'd spend all my time pointing out that he's weaker than bus-station chili. But the man is so constantly subjected to such hideous and unfair abuse that I wind up standing up for him on the general principle that some fairness should be applied. Besides, no one but a fool or a Republican ever took him for a liberal." (Introduction to You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You)
On James M. Collins, US Representative, R-Dallas: "If his IQ slips any lower we'll have to water him twice a day." Collins had said that the current energy crisis could be averted if "...we didn't use all that gas on school busing..." Ivins' quote engendered substantial controversy, with calls and letters pouring into her newspaper, The Dallas Times Herald. The newspaper turned the controversy into a publicity campaign, with billboards all over the city asking, "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?"—which she later employed as the title for her first book.
On George W. Bush, she likened him to a Post Turtle.
"Of Bush's credentials as an economic conservative, there is no question at all - he owes his political life to big corporate money; he's a CEO's wet dream. He carries their water, he's stumpbroke - however you put it, George W. Bush is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America. ... We can find no evidence that it has ever occurred to him to question whether it is wise to do what big business wants."
In addition to these formal awards, Ivins said that she was particularly proud of two distinct honors: having the Minneapolis police force's mascot pig named after her, and being banned from the Texas A&M; campus.
In Huntsville, TX each year the Walker County Democrat Club has a Charity Dinner in honor of Molly Ivins.
Category:1944 births Category:2007 deaths Category:Alumni of Sciences Po Category:American anti-Iraq War activists Category:American columnists Category:American journalists Category:American political writers Category:Deaths from breast cancer Category:Columbia University alumni Category:People from Houston, Texas Category:Smith College alumni Category:Scripps College alumni Category:Alumnae of women's universities and colleges Category:Writers from Texas Category:Cancer deaths in Texas
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Bill Moyers |
|---|---|
| Caption | Bill Moyers, 2005 |
| Office | 13th White House Press Secretary |
| Term start | 1965 |
| Term end | 1967 |
| President | Lyndon B. Johnson |
| Predecessor | George Reedy |
| Successor | George Christian |
| Birth date | June 05, 1934 |
| Birth place | Hugo, Oklahoma, United States |
| Party | Independent |
| Spouse | Judith Suzanne Moyers (née Davidson) |
| Children | William Cope, Alice Suzanne, and John Davidson |
| Grandchildren | William Henry, Thomas Edward, Nancy Judith, Sarah Jane, and Jassi |
| Residence | New York City, New York, United States |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Religion | United Church of Christ |
Bill Moyers (born June 5, 1934) is an American journalist and public commentator. He served as White House Press Secretary in the United States President Lyndon B. Johnson Administration from 1965 to 1967. He worked as a news commentator on television for ten years. Moyers has had an extensive involvement with public television, producing documentaries and news journal programs. He has won numerous awards and honorary degrees. He has become well known as a trenchant critic of the U.S. media. Since 1990, Moyers has been President of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. He lives in New York City, New York, United States.
He started his journalism career at sixteen as a cub reporter at the Marshall News Messenger in Marshall, Texas. In college, he studied journalism at the North Texas State College in Denton, Texas. In 1954, then U.S. Senator Lyndon B. Johnson employed him as a summer intern and eventually promoted him to manage Johnson's personal mail. Soon after, Moyers transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, where he wrote for The Daily Texan newspaper. In 1956, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism. While in Austin, Moyers served as assistant news editor for KTBC radio and television stations - owned by Lady Bird Johnson, wife of then U.S. Senator Johnson. During the academic year 1956–1957, he studied issues of church and state at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom, as a Rotary International Fellow. In 1959, he completed a Master of Divinity degree at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.
Moyers also sought information from the FBI on the sexual preferences of White House staff members, most notably Jack Valenti. Moyers indicated his memory was unclear on why Johnson directed him to request such information, "but that he may have been simply looking for details of allegations first brought to the president by Hoover."
Moyers approved (but had nothing to do with the production) of the infamous "Daisy Ad" against Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign. That ad is regarded to be the starting point of the modern-day harshly negative campaign ad.
Journalist Morley Safer in 1990 wrote that Moyers and President Johnson met with and "harangued" Safer's boss, CBS president Frank Stanton, about Safer's coverage of the behaviour of U.S. troops in Vietnam (Safer had filmed them burning down a village). During the meeting, Safer alleges, Johnson threatened to expose Safer's "communist ties". This was a bluff, according to Safer. Safer says that Moyers was "if not a key player, certainly a key bystander" in the incident. Moyers stated that his hard-hitting coverage of conservative presidents Reagan and Bush were behind Safer's 1990 allegations.
In The New York Times on April 3, 1966, Moyers offered this insight on his stint as press secretary to President Johnson: "I work for him despite his faults and he lets me work for him despite my deficiencies." On October 17, 1967, he told an audience in Cambridge that Johnson saw the war in Vietnam as his major legacy and, as a result, was insisting on victory at all costs, even in the face of public opposition. Moyers felt such a continuation of the conflict would tear the country apart. "I never thought the situation could arise when I would wish for the defeat of LBJ, and that makes my current state of mind all the more painful to me," he told them. "I would have to say now: It would depend on who his opponent is."
The full details of his rift with Johnson have not been made public but may be discussed in a forthcoming memoir.
On November 20, 2009, Moyers announced that he would be retiring from his weekly show on April 30, 2010.
Meanwhile, the public has failed to react because it is, in his words, "distracted by the media circus and news has been neutered or politicized for partisan purposes." In support of this, he referred to "the paradox of Rush Limbaugh, ensconced in a Palm Beach mansion massaging the resentments across the country of white-knuckled wage earners, who are barely making ends meet in no small part because of the corporate and ideological forces for whom Rush has been a hero.... As Eric Alterman reports in his recent book—a book that I'm proud to have helped make happen—part of the red meat strategy is to attack mainstream media relentlessly, knowing that if the press is effectively intimidated, either by the accusation of liberal bias or by a reporter's own mistaken belief in the charge's validity, the institutions that conservatives revere—corporate America, the military, organized religion, and their own ideological bastions of influence—will be able to escape scrutiny and increase their influence over American public life with relatively no challenge."
Furthermore, Moyers indicated that Hanna gathered support for McKinley's presidential campaign from "the corporate interests of the day" and was responsible for Ohio and Washington coming under the rule of "bankers, railroads and public utility corporations." He submitted that political opponents of this transfer of power were "smeared as disturbers of the peace, socialists, anarchists, or worse."
He concludes, "This 'degenerate and unlovely age', as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove, the reputed brain of George W. Bush, as the seminal age of inspiration for the politics and governance of America today." Then in October 2006 Ralph Nader wrote an article supporting a Moyers candidacy. There was no effect from the op-eds, and Moyers did not run.
During coverage of the 2004 presidential election, Moyers stated, "I think that if Kerry were to win this in a tight race, I think that there would be an effort to mount a coup, quite frankly. I mean that the right wing is not going to accept it." Washington Post columnist George Will commented that Moyers "is an intellectual icon in the sort of deep blue precincts that think red America is paranoid." Democratic ex-Mayor of New York City Ed Koch, and John Leo.
Moyers has been a regular subject of viewer letters to PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler, who notes that "Moyers clearly has huge numbers of fans among PBS viewers, and they depend on his reporting, analysis and commentary. He clearly also has lots of critics who view him as a relentless Bush-basher." For example, a July 13, 2007, edition of Bill Moyers Journal discussed the possible impeachment of then-President George W. Bush and featured guests from opposing ends of the political spectrum that both supported impeachment; Getler praised Moyers for his initiative in highlighting different topics but said "there was almost a complete absence of balance" and "no rebuttal arguments or legal challenges" to the impeachment grounds laid out. Moyers and Getler discussed their views about balance in the next column. On August 16, 2007, Moyers stated that Karl Rove was a secular skeptic and agnostic who had manipulated the Christian right for partisan purposes. The next day, Rove denied he was an agnostic and criticized Moyers's remarks as inaccurate and relying upon a blogger; Getler criticized Moyers's remark as unsupported. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League sent a letter to Moyers accusing him of "anti-Semitism" and "ignorance" for suggesting that Jews were "genetically coded" for violence; Moyers denied the charges and asserted that Foxman's letter contained a number of errors and that his rhetorical tactics were "reprehensible".
Category:1934 births Category:American media critics Category:American television news anchors Category:Baptists from the United States Category:DuPont-Columbia Award recipients Category:Emmy Award winners Category:George Polk Award recipients Category:Living people Category:Lyndon B. Johnson Administration personnel Category:Newsday people Category:Peabody Award winners Category:People from Choctaw County, Oklahoma Category:People from Marshall, Texas Category:Texas Democrats Category:University of Texas at Austin alumni Category:White House Press Secretaries Category:National Humanities Medal recipients
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
