Broadcast journalist and television veteran Bill Moyers will speak to the Class of 1993 today at graduation.
Moyers, 59, has been involved with journalism for more than four decades, donning many hats in the process.
From his early days as a 15-year-old reporter for the Marshall News Messenger in Texas to his post as chief correspondent for CBS from 1976 to 1978, Moyers has analyzed and reported on America and the world with his soft Texas twang.
As head of his New York City production company, Public Affairs Television, Moyers has broadcast more than 125 programs such as a companion series to his book "Healing and the Mind" and "Moyers: 20 Years of Listening to America," a 1991 documentary celebration of his two decades of reporting.
Moyers has won most major broadcast journalism awards, including 10 Emmys awards. Moyers was recently included in NBC's "wish list" of possible replacements for the company's resigning president.
As a television journalist, Moyers has consistently tackled the largest issues in America's past, present and future. He has produced 600 hours of broadcasts.
In 1988, Moyers won critical acclaim for a Public Broadcasting System television series of interviews with mythologist Joseph Campbell, viewed by an estimated 30 million people.
"We will report on what ordinary Americans and others think about the issues facing us, and why so many Americans feel that they hate politics," Moyers told the Los Angeles Times in 1991.
His 1992 television series "Listening to America" chronicled issues facing the American voter in the 1992 election.
Billy Don Moyers was born June 5, 1934 in Hugo, Okla. and later moved to Marshall, Texas where his father worked as a driver and time keeper.
Moyers graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1954. He also holds degrees from the University of Edinburgh and the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
In 1954 Moyers wrote to then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson and offered to help the Senator's re-election campaign. Johnson accepted and the two forged a professional relationship which grew stronger over the years.
Moyers was associate director and later deputy director of the Peace Corps.
Moyers became the President Johnson's special assistant in 1963 and later served as Johnson's press secretary and speech writer.
Moyers left the White House when his brother died so he could help support his brother's family.
In December 1966, Moyers became the publisher of Newsday, the largest circulation suburban daily newspaper in America.
Newsday won 33 major journalism awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes, within three years after Moyers' arrival.
Moyers later returned to the White House, this time as a reporter. In 1980 he produced a documentary series for CBS News on Ronald Reagan and his association with born again Christians and the right wing.
In May 1970, Moyers began a 13,000-mile journey across America to conduct research for his book "Listening to America; A Traveler Rediscovers His Country."
"I learned that it is possible to write bills and publish newspapers without knowing what the country is about or who the people are," Moyers wrote in the introduction. "I wanted to hear people speak for themselves."
In 1972 Moyers joined New York's public television station WNET and turned his interest in the common person into the series "Bill Moyers' Journal."
As head of PBS, Moyers is now charting the station's course for the 21st century.
"I think PBS has to find a different mission from what it's had [for the] last 10 or 15 years," he told The Los Angeles Times. "I hope it does for education in the broadest sense of that word and doesn't try to compete with high-brow entertainment. I don't think we can be the Disney Channel or Arts and Entertainment or HBO."
Moyers has interviewed a wide range of people during his journalism career including Ronald Reagan, Federal Judge Frank Johnson Jr, Maya Angelou, Pinchas Zukerman, George Steiner and John Huston.
In a 1988 conversation with The New York Times, Moyers said of his interviews, "[The public] wants it out there. They are hungry for it."
In 1986, when Moyers was honored by Norman Lear's People for the American Way, comedian Jay Leno said, "TV game shows produce mutant offspring. Moyers makes you think."
But Moyers has not worked without criticism.
Conservative Andrew Ferguson, in an editorial in the New Republic, vehemently attacked Moyers for his work with Campbell -- as a "descent into pop spiritualism" -- and his work with the Johnson campaign's "daisy" commercial that attacked Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater as trigger-happy with regard to nuclear arms.
