Bill Moyers: On Journalism And Democracy

April 25, 2007

Bill Moyers is chairman of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and an independent journalist with his own production company. He is launching a new weekly series on PBS in April, and his documentary "Buying the War," about the press and the buildup to the war in Iraq, airs tonight on PBS.This interview first appeared in The Christian Century.

You were part of the Johnson administration during its escalation of the Vietnam War. What perspective does that experience give you on the current administration and the war in Iraq?

Both Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush made the mistake of embracing a totalistic policy for a concrete reality that requires instead a more pragmatic response. You shouldn't go to war for a Grand Theory on a hunch, yet both men plunged into complex local quarrels only to discover that they were treading on quicksand. And they learned too late that American exceptionalism doesn't mean we can work our will anywhere we please. While freedom may be a universal yearning, democracy is not, alas, a universal solution—there are too many extenuating circumstances.