A Great But Broken Promise

Bill Moyers

May 23, 2007

Bill Moyers is chairman of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and an independent journalist with his own production company. This article is the commencement address Bill Moyers gave this year at Southern Methodist University.


Thank you for this honor and for inviting me to participate in this occasion. It would be a privilege to receive your honorary degree anytime, but I am especially pleased to be on the same platform with Marsh Terry, a beacon from “High on the Hilltop” for all these years now, and Bill Solomon, whose business and civic contributions are laced with a deep social conscience. I am humbled to be standing between two originals—one in literature, the humanities and the classroom, and the other in corporate governance and community service.

I am, after all, just a journalist. I make my living explaining things I don’t understand—a beachcomber on the shores of other people’s experience and wisdom. Furthermore, I know just where journalists stand on the scale of approval in our country. Some years ago when I gave the commencement at another university, a young woman who had just graduated came up to me and said, “Mr. Moyers, you have been in both journalism and government. That makes everything you say twice as hard to believe.”