ON BILL MOYERS JOURNAL – FRIDAY 11/20/2009

?The PBS mainstay Bill Moyers said he was retiring from weekly television and would end his Friday night public affairs show, “Bill Moyers Journal,” on April 30, 2010. That date will also be the last for “Now on PBS,” which has been canceled.

Mr. Moyers said he had been planning for some time to retire the program on Dec. 25, but was asked by PBS to raise the funds to continue through April, which he did.

“I am 75 years old,” he said of the decision to end the series, which began in April 2007. The program has recently been having a “good run of it,” he added in a telephone interview on Friday, “so I feel it’s time.” He said he was not quitting television work, although he has no new projects planned.

“Now” began in January 2002, and was originally hosted by Mr. Moyers. John Siceloff, the executive producer, said the program, hosted now by David Brancaccio, had been “a unique voice at a time when outlets for insightful journalism are diminishing. We’re all looking for places to continue that work.”

PBS said in a statement that it was in the middle of a “review and reinvention” of its news and public affairs programming, and that it would announce plans for its lineup in January.

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Bill Moyer is a bright star of honesty on US television and will be seriously missed. If the constraints of the economy force him to move away from Public Television onto some cable program, this will be a further blow to the anemic watchdog that is still active on US corporations in the name of a real public interst for the American people and the world globe also. What will be the meaning of US Public TV without Bill Moyer? Lots of people worry, and we received some mail asking us to pay attention to potential further back stepping from positive and informative media in our days. One such e-mail came from Harry Sommers.