The following are excerpts from an item posted on CommonDreams.org. If you would like to read the whole article, go to the website, click on 'Archives' - it's at the very bottom of the page - and then click on Monday, May 16, Bill Moyers Defends PBS, Takes Aim At 'Radical Right'

Published on Monday, May 16, 2005 by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)

by Michael Sorkin

Bill Moyers denounced on Sunday the right wing and top officials at the White House, saying they are trying to silence their critics by controlling the news media.

He also took aim at reporters who become little more than willing government "stenographers." And he said the public increasingly is content with just enough news to confirm its own biases.

Moyers said those in power - government officials and their allies in the media - mean to stay there by punishing journalists "who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable."

He said he always thought that the American eagle needed both a left wing and a right wing. "But with two right wings, or two left wings, it's no longer an eagle, and it's going to crash."

Moyers said right wingers had attacked him after he closed a broadcast by placing a flag in his lapel.

It was the first time that he had worn a flag. He said he put it on to remind himself that "not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us."

"The flag has been hijacked and turned into a logo, a trademark of a monopoly on patriotism," Moyers said.

Moyers had harsh words for reporters who simply recount what officials say, without scrutinizing what they say and do.

He said New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, among other reporters, had relied on official but unnamed sources "when she served essentially as the government's stenographer for claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction."

Moyers said he has come to understand that "news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity."

"Without a trace of irony, the powers that be have appropriated the news speak vernacular of George Orwell's '1984,' giving us a program, no child will be left behind, while cutting funds for educating disadvantaged children.

He said the public shares the blame:

"An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical."

"It's true that no one laid out a battle plan," said Mercedes Lynn DeUriarte, an associate journalism professor from the University of Texas at Austin. "But everybody left understanding that we're at a critical point, where we must find a way to protect a democratic press or risk democracy."

*My Mom has always been my Mom and none of that other stuff.

*They say she used to be nice.

*Mom was working in a store and dad was shoplifting.

*His last name.

*She had to know his background. Like is he a crook? Does he make at least $800 a year? Did he say NO to drugs and YES to chores?

* She got too old to do anything else with him.

*Just her children.

*On the inside she's already perfect. Outside, I think some kind of

plastic surgery.

*Diet. You know, her hair. I'd dye-it, maybe blue.

Dolores Garcia (1889-198?)

Psychiatrist Robert Coles moved to New Mexico in 1972 to continue his work with Spanish-speaking children. But people kept telling him, If you want to know the children, you must first know the Old Ones. He met Dolores Garcia, Una Anciana, when she was eighty-three. She and her husband, Domingo, had always lived off the land, with a garden, cows, and chickens.

see Dolores Garcia Page 5