We knew that the success of NOW’s journalism was creating a backlash in Washington. The more compelling our journalism, the angrier became the radical right of the Republican Party. That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.

This is the point of my story. Ideologues don’t want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right because people may start believing you. They embrace a world view that cannot be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and when it doesn’t, God forbid. Never mind that their own stars were getting a fair shake on “NOW,” Gigot, Viguerie, David Keen of the American Conservative Union, Steven Moore of the Club for Growth. Our reporting – our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn’t the party line. It wasn’t that we were getting it wrong, either. Only three times in three years did we err factually, and in each case we corrected those errors as soon as we confirmed their inaccuracy. I believe our broadcast was the best researched on public broadcasting.

And the problem was that we were telling stories that partisans in power didn’t want told, and we were getting it right, not rightwing. Let me tell you something – and we can argue about this at some other time – I’ve always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. And both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it’s no longer an eagle, and it’s going to crash.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you that my occasional -- and I didn’t do them that often -- my occasional commentaries got to them, as well. Although apparently he never watched the broadcast -- I guess he couldn’t take the diversity -- Senator Trent Lott came out squealing like a stuck pig when, after the mid-term elections in 2002, I described what was likely to happen now that all three branches of government were about to be controlled by one party dominated by the religious, corporate and political right. Instead of congratulating the winners for their election victory as some network broadcasters did or celebrating their victory as Fox, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, Talk Radio and other partisan Republican journalists did, I provided a little independent analysis of what the victory meant. And I did it the old-fashioned way. I looked at the record, took the winners at their word and drew the logical conclusions that they would use power as they had said for twenty-five years they would. And then, of course, I set it forth in my usual modest Texas way.

Events since then have confirmed the accuracy of what I said. I had our research team, and I worked very much with them, put together with mainstream news clippings to support every sentence in that particular post-election analysis. But then strange things began to happen. Friends in Washington called to say that they had heard of muttered threats that the PBS reauthorization would be held up unless Moyers is dealt with. The Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, was said to be quite agitated. I didn’t know it at the time, but within two months after taking over, three months after taking over, he wrote a letter to PBS complaining about the unbalanced “NOW.”

Apparently there was apoplexy in the right wing area, particularly when I closed the broadcast one Friday night by putting a flag in my lapel and said – well, here’s exactly what I said. Here’s a copy of what I said: “I wore my flag tonight, first time. Until now I haven’t thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans. Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustain me, whose armed forces protected me and whose ideals inspired me. I offered my heart’s affection in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother’s picture on my lapel to prove her son’s love. Mother knew where I stood. So does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15th. So what’s this doing here? I put it on to take it back. The flag’s been hijacked and turned into a logo, the trademark – the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On most Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it’s the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration’s patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official labels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao’s Little Red Book of orthodoxy on every official’s desk, omnipresent and unread.

”But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapel while writing books and running web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They’re in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks, even as they call for spending more on war.

”So I put this on as a modest repose to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks. or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don’t have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the ‘Coalition of the Willing.’ I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government, and it reminds me that it’s not un-American to think that war, except in self defense, is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.”

That did it. That did it. You should have heard Ann Coulter at the next conservative convention. I think that’s where she got the title for her book, her book about Democrats and treason. That did it. And our continued reporting on overpricing at Halliburton, chicanery on K Street and the heavy, if divinely-guided hand, of Tom DeLay.

When Senator Lott protested that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has not seemed willing to deal with Bill Moyers, a new member of the board, a Republican fundraiser named Cheryl Halpern, who had been appointed by President Bush, agreed that CPB needed more power to do just that sort of thing. She left no doubt about the kind of penalty she would like to see imposed on the malefactors.

Now, hear me again: as rumors circulated about all this, I asked to meet with the entire CBS board – I wanted to – CPB Board, thank you. I wanted to hear for myself what they were saying. I thought it would be helpful for someone like me who had been present at the creation and part of the system for almost forty years, to talk about how CPB had been intended to be a heat shield to protect public broadcasters from exactly this kind of intimidation. After all, I’d been there at the time of Richard Nixon’s attempted coup. In those days, public television had been really feisty and independent and often targeted for attacks. A Woody Allen special that poked fun at Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration had actually been cancelled. Jon Stewart wouldn’t have stood a chance if he had started his career on PBS. The White House had been so outraged over a documentary called “The Banks and the Poor” about discrimination, about rich financial institutions against the poor, that PBS was driven to adopt new guidelines. That didn’t satisfy Nixon, and when public television hired two NBC reporters, the radicals Robert McNeil and Sander Vanocur to co-anchor some new broadcast, it was, for Nixon, the last straw. According to White House memos at the time, he was determined, (quote), “to get the left wing commentators who are cutting us up off public television at once; indeed, yesterday, if possible.” Sound familiar?