Bill Moyers Can Eat A Nut

Not crazy, just fond of wasting a nightly hour p'raps.

xpost, yes yes.

(I don't know if Charlie Rose is really into the booze, but he sure looks like it all the time)

I was happy to see Van Hunt on Tavis Smiley last night. That is all.

I've only watched him a couple of times, but CR's heavy-lidded gaze looked to me like the telltale sign of recent marijuana use.

he's opening up tim russert like a clam on an iraq war special on right now. He says during the runup to the war he was instructed to have 2 conservatives for every liberal on his show and complied. Bill got a big zing in but it takes some setup.

god Peter Beinart is a little shit. He slimes out of questions about his hawkishness and misrepresentation by going on a jag about print being superior to television.

he's opening up tim russert like a clam

why did you have to say it this way

as if the thread title wasn't enough clue lol

worst slash ever

beinart is like a first-order sleazebag

dan rather getting flogged too, after faux-flogging himself. this was well done.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html

bob simon (60 minutes) came off well; I don't remember what their coverage was like at the time but he says they consciously covered their muckracking by going lighter with it rather than attacking the official line head-on.

Moyers is so light speed ahead of Rose it ain't even funny.

Rose's celebrity interviews are enjoyably daffy. He has that instinct to show off that he knows where his guest is going with a thought and he's wrong like %80 of the time even when he's done his homework.

Moyers, otoh, is a consistently well-informed, eloquent devil's advocate who seems to generally be otm like Washington.

Taking his generally ornery and baiting line of questioning at face value or as smugness is something close to intentionally disingenuous.

Also: "generally"

he is, as you say, "otm like washington" most of the time in his line of questions, but he's also insufferably smug. the two aren't mutually exclusive.

i would never use the word 'smug' to describe moyers ... where do you all get this?

seriously

charlie rose is pretty good at wrangling roundtables of media types, except he tends to put left liberals at the kids table, figuratively and sometimes literally.

the primary discussions i've seen have been pretty good, the horseraceishness isn't as pronounced as one might think.

and his interviews with norman mailer were pretty fun, he did a couple retrospectives after he passed.

but he's pretty dud most of the time. he bootlicked his way through the iraq war while we're on the subject

I read his son's rehab bio and in there, pops seems like the most patient and loving person the world has ever known. I always think about that now when I see him.

http://media.npr.org/programs/fa/features/2006/oct/broken200.jpg

I love Moyers.

Cope sank pretty damned low. At his worst, he moved in with his crack dealer until he ran out of money in the bank. Several times.

I have Charlie Rose's face tattooed on my ass

you going to fill in the rest of your ass with a black background?

charlie rose pwns his black ass

Charlie Rose v. Tavis Smiley in the patented PBS barbed-wire DeathCage, sponsored by Lockheed Martin and the Toyota Prius. Who wins?

I don't think tavis can squeeze any more desperation out of his hulking frame.

he'd punch himself out then charlie would insert his speculum into his brain at will

tavis looks like he's taping from the love connection set, has anyone seen that thing?

Travis Smiley Plays Self-Serious Guy

no he's totally sub-arsenio now

a sight to see

he is totally arsenio's sugar-daddy

Every media personality has to concoct an on-air persona. Some personae are just grating. For me, Moyers is not insufferable, in spite of his many sledgehammer mannerisms, but I can readily see how he could drive another person over the edge.

What saves him is that he does a better job of gathering and presenting useful information about a subject than 99% of news reporters and the subjects he investigates are generally not an easy sell to the folks who pay the bills and therefore rarely covered at all. I appreciate that.

From what I hear, Moyers does not 'concoct an on-air persona' at all... he is constantly like he is (present-day Moyers, not 1980s Moyers)

Cap'n-save-a-Bill I'm turning into.

Tavis's half-Indiana accent vs. the fact that Rose does all interviews with no shoes on

Tavis's question preambles vs. the time Jim Lehrer was on Rose and the two of them just giggled like schoolgirls and made inside jokes for 15 minutes

vs. a joke from some sitcom I can't remember:

- Did you have that sex dream about Charlie Rose again?
- It's not a sex dream. He just interview me, while we hold hands.

Tavis Smiley is the thinking man's Byron Allen

bill moyers final 'journal' :(

http://www.truthout.org/bill-moyers-journal-21st-century-populism58942

good riddance dickhole

damn itt tremendoid be dogging tavis smiley. brothers gonna work it out

man f you rahni wise up

bill moyers is a legend and pretty much always right-on but i know what jergins means about "heavy-handed grasping for meaning and depth in EVERY question"

it's not enough for him to let his subjects simply do the talking. moyers isn't of the "give em enough rope" school. he's like a cross-examiner who leads the questions right where he wants - it's annoying

yeh he's no katie couric ;)
no i get it too but i guess not having ever expected anything resembling dispassion out of his specials and whatnot made it easier to indulge his style. regularly talking to more folks he fundamentally disagreed with might help his 'case' (even when he invites conservatives it's invariably to discuss common-ground issues). the ability to make illuminating/galvanizing television out of near-hagiography (at times) is its own kind of awesome imo

moyers was surprisingly ruthless & tough when he flacked for LBJ, from what I've read. perhaps his subsequent career has been a mea culpa on some level.

He's done a lot of solid work the last few years, almost enough to palliate his role as LBJ's hatchet man.