AMY GOODMAN: Bill Moyers, on his show on PBS, Bill Moyers Journal. Bill Moyers, here today on Democracy Now! Bill, were you surprised you got the first interview with Jeremiah Wright after all of the controversy, after he had been quiet for weeks? Were you surprised when Senator Obama denounced him?

BILL MOYERS: No, because between my interview and Obama’s press conference, Jeremiah Wright had, as I said in that commentary, left Obama no choice, because of the way the momentum had been driven by the press and by the partisans and by opponents. Nobody stopped to put all of this into context. So I wasn’t surprised.

You know, we are accustomed in politics to seeing candidates having to jettison some of their closest supporters. Lyndon Johnson had to do that to the single man who was more responsible for his longtime success than anyone else, when he was arrested in 1964 in a men’s room in Washington. This aide had to be let go by Lyndon Johnson in a public statement, grieved LBJ for the rest of his life.

But no, you know, people have written me since all of this and said, “How do you explain that a man so reasonable in conversation on Friday night could on Sunday at the NAACP and Monday at the National Press Club be so angry?” And I had to say, “I’m not a psychologist. I don’t know.”

I know that—look, Jeremiah Wright was in this church for thirty-six years. I had never met him. I belong to the United Church of Christ denomination, but I had never heard of Jeremiah Wright. He was a local pastor. That was his calling. That was his commitment. That was his passion. If Obama had not been in his congregation, we’d never have heard of Jeremiah Wright.

But over the—someone figured out, at Christian Century magazine, figured out that over thirty-six years on the 11:00 Sunday morning services, he had preached 207,711 minutes. And the sound bites that were being looped throughout the mainstream media and the rightwing media were sixteen to twenty seconds. How would you like for your long career in journalism as a broadcaster to be summed up at the end in sixteen to twenty seconds? I understand that anger, that frustration, that he—that was driving him to finally want to speak.

I wanted to have him on my program, because I was curious myself: who is this man? I had never met him, although I had been a member of that same fellowship for forty years. I tried to put him in context. We did a piece about his church, trying to show the outreach, the ministry of his church. We dealt with black liberation theology, which is the view, simply put, that people interpret the scriptures through the experience of the oppressed, not the people on top of the slave ship, as Jeremiah Wright said, but the people in the hold of the slave ship.

And it was a reasonable, interesting, revealing conversation. I’m not a very adversarial fellow. I’m not a gotcha kind of journalist. Mike Wallace can do that much better than I can. And it was a very reasonable interview. But I think that the pent-up frustration of how he was being treated in the mainstream media and the fact that he was being taken out of context—the remark about chickens come home to roost, he wasn’t saying that 9/11 was done because—as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said, because God wanted it to happen, but that there are consequences to actions.

The remark about HIV, I didn’t get to ask him that on the show. We ran out of time. But, you know, in the black community, where I’ve reported, done documentaries on black churches, black community organizers, in the black community, they’re still haunted by the fact, what is a historical fact, that the United States government used black men at Tuskegee Institute who think they were being treated for syphilis, when they were being allowed to die for a scientific test. That anger has been building up. I understand that. It’s unfortunate it gets in the mainstream media and Obama has to do what he did.

AMY GOODMAN: On the interview, the PBS ombudsman commented about it. He wrote a column critical of your questioning. Michael Getler wrote, “There were not enough questions asked and some that were asked came across as too reserved and too soft, considering the volatility of the charges. […] Statements that Moyers himself laid out at the top of the program went largely unchallenged and those that did come up didn’t really get addressed until well into the hour-long program.” Your response to that?

BILL MOYERS: Well, that’s true. I didn’t get to ask all the questions I wanted to ask. It was a forty-minute interview. And I was much more interested—I knew what was going to happen when he went to the National Press Club on Monday morning. I knew that they were going to be asking all of these questions. I leave that to those people whose job it is for the commercial media.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you go to Wright, or did Wright come to you to do the interview?

BILL MOYERS: What happened was, a group of several African American ministers called me after all of this broke, and they said, “You know, is it possible on your show to have a discussion of black liberation theology?”

And my answer was, “You know, we can, of course. But that won’t do any good until Reverend Wright speaks for himself. Unless we hear from him, see who he is, what he thinks, where he’s coming from, then what the rest of us do might be interesting and even might be positive, but it won’t answer the questions.” So I said to them, “Reverend Wright should speak. And if he wants to come on my broadcast, I’ll give the whole broadcast to it.”

Well, about—he was on vacation at that time, a long-planned trip to Africa. The moment he got back, I got a call from his church, his communications person, saying he’d like to do it.

AMY GOODMAN: What did you think of the ABC debate in Pennsylvania with the news anchors going for the first forty-five minutes—really going at Obama around issues, everything from pastors to pins, lapel pins?

BILL MOYERS: I thought it was a great exercise in irrelevance. Going back to one of your earlier questions, we never really—we rarely probe these candidates on what they would do about the fundamental systemic issues facing America. It has become a horse race in the media and on the campaign. That’s inevitable in some respects. But I was really sad to see our craft reduced to that kind of petty and parochial concerns. These debates, moderated and mediated by the press, have really become about the press. The Sunday morning talk shows are all about themselves. They’re not really about what’s happening—they’re not trying to help the people in Dubuque or Dallas or Des Moines get an understanding of the candidates.

AMY GOODMAN: On the issue of broadcasting and media, you’re broadcasting on PBS. Do you think it has become, well, let’s say, to put it mildly, risk-averse? Go back forty years to the Carnegie Commission and the founding of public broadcasting. You were there in the White House. You were the press secretary for Lyndon Johnson. You came in in ’63, when he came in after Kennedy’s assassination?

BILL MOYERS: Yes. The first two years, I was his general assistant and the fellow who was coordinating his domestic policy. I actually helped put together the task force that led to the creation of public broadcasting in—Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. I had left in January of ’67. But my first job, before he insisted—after three times I had said no—he insisted I become the press secretary, was dealing with issues like the environment, civil rights, public broadcasting and all of that. So, yes, I was present at the creation.

And I have to say that public broadcasting today is not the adventuresome, the risk-taking exercise in diversity and pluralism and democracy that we had hoped it would be. It lacks the financial independence to take the risks that you can only take when you have nothing to lose, because 70 percent of public broadcasting’s funding comes from Congress. That makes it political in the eyes of many people, even though that influence is marginal. You know, I’ve advocated for years publicly that Democracy Now! should be on public broadcasting.

AMY GOODMAN: And it is on a number of PBS stations.

BILL MOYERS: A number of stations, but it’s not fed through the system. It’s not a system-wide—it should be. And there should be other reasonable voices with different philosophies than yours and mine on the air. But it is hamstrung by financial penury, and it’s embedded in a system that is altogether too political, and so it doesn’t take the risks that we ought to be taking. We ought to be the forum for the country.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of Kenneth Tomlinson, the man who made you his target, possibly drove you off PBS for a while, giving $5 million to the Wall Street Journal Report that aired on PBS, $5 million? Now it goes to FOX, so PBS becomes the incubator for programs in the commercial media.

BILL MOYERS: Well, I address that story in two of the speeches I delivered that are published in Moyers on Democracy. They didn’t drive me off the air. PBS took—stood behind me. Pat Mitchell, the then-president of PBS, was under enormous pressure. I wasn’t even aware of how much pressure until I left.

The main reason I left—I had been doing this weekly broadcast, I was seventy years old, I was tired, I needed a rest. But the main reason I left is that I could not oppose—I knew what Kenneth Tomlinson and the—who was Karl Rove’s man at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—I knew what they were doing. I had friends still working at CPB. One of them called me and said, you know, Tomlinson has said his job is to get rid of Moyers. Well, I wasn’t going to let that happen, but I finally realized that the only way I could deal with Kenneth Tomlinson and the rightwing effort to intimidate public broadcasting was to leave the air for awhile, because I couldn’t use my broadcast, I couldn’t use the camera to oppose him, because it would appear to be self-serving. So I left.

I retired at the age of seventy, went out and made a series of speeches. Most of them are in that book. Two of them dealt directly with Tomlinson. And I worked with friends of public broadcasting in Washington to tell the story of what was happening.

As a result of that and other things, the integrity of—the inspector general at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting looked into Tomlinson’s activities and decided they were violating the rules and the regulations. He had to leave the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He was not reappointed. And then he had to also leave the Board of Governors of the overseas broadcasting, the United States overseas broadcasting, because he had engaged in many of the same questionable activities there that he had done at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. When that was over and I had felt that I had had my say without abusing my position at public broadcasting, I came back with a weekly series.

But this is not the first time, Amy. You know that starting with Richard Nixon and Patrick Buchanan, when Buchanan was Nixon’s director of communications, they tried to undo public broadcasting. Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole tried to undo public broadcasting. George W. Bush wants to defund even the modest amount of money we get from Congress. There’s been a consistent fight, because the conservatives don’t want an alternative view of reality. We’re not going to propagate their propaganda. They don’t like it when there’s any kind of opposition or any—someone who doesn’t cooperate with them, they don’t like. So they have been consistently, from 1970 forward, trying to undo public broadcasting. And that’s one of the reasons public broadcasting hasn’t soared as the independent source of journalism, analysis and debate that it should be.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to the legendary broadcaster, Bill Moyers. He has a new book out. It’s called Moyers on Democracy. We’ll be back with him in a minute.