Public television, and the newsmedia in general, have lost much with his recent retirement from NOW. I watch the show weekly and it has long been one of the key sources of information that I have come to trust. Thankfully the show will remain on air with David Brancaccio taking over, but I think that we all owe a debt to Bill Moyers for continuing to speak truth to power and allowing many voices otherwise never heard a weekly forum for discussion.

From the last episode of NOW w/Bill Moyers:

"What a good run we've had, you and I. But when David returns with the new NOW three weeks from tonight, I'll be out there, a viewer like you. First I want to thank the many people here who have worked so hard these three years to get us to this point. If that camera could pull back for a really wide shot you would find me standing on their shoulders. We'll run the credits at the end a little more slowly so that you can see just who they are.

Over my three decades in broadcast journalism I've never fooled myself about how it works. I am sure God made reporters and producers before she made little green apples. I stand in awe of researchers who know that news is what powerful people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity. Editors you never see work miracles that show up on the screen. I've known camera and sound crews as careful as surgeons, as tough as Marines, as brave as astronauts, and I've known directors and stage managers as witty and wise as Shakespeare.

Public television executives have to be made of strong stuff, too. The brass at PBS — Pat Mitchell, John Wilson, and Coby Atlas in particular — came up with the idea for this broadcast, and then stood up for it against fierce attacks from partisan ideologues who can't bear to have their version of reality measured against evidence to the contrary. My colleagues at our flagship station here in New York, from Bill Baker on down, formed a firewall of fellowship around us on day one and have never wavered. Nor have those foundations whose funds guarantee our independence or my sole corporate underwriter for 13 years now, Mutual of America Life Insurance Company. Even when the controversies we kicked up caused them headaches, my friends at Mutual never flinched, in no small part because they, too, believe saving capitalism from its excesses and democracy from inertia is in the spirit of America.

In particular, I want you to know of two remarkable women who, if this were a just world, would be credited as the heart and soul of NOW. Judy Doctoroff joined me seventeen years ago soon after graduating from Yale and worked her way up to majordomo. It fell to her three years ago to gather the team that would get us on the air in just six weeks. No one has worked at my side longer, or made a greater difference. Except, of course, Judith Davidson Moyers, the president of our company, the source of many of our best ideas, the executive producer of some of our most successful series, and co-editor of all we do, including NOW.

That's her a few years ago, on location in a freezing rain, as we filmed a series on poetry.

She and I have made a long voyage since our marriage 50 years ago this weekend, sometimes in waters so wicked they almost took us down. But as Charlotte Bronte said of her Alfred, "We intended to be married this way almost from the first; we never meant to be spliced in the humdrum way of other people." She and I still have time left to discover what we don't yet know about each other, and that comes next.

Finally, my thanks to you, for being there time and again, for coming back even after we've let you down. I treasure your letters and e-mail and will take many of them with me as I would a family album — even the angry harangues usually from kissin' cousins.

I've learned from you not to claim too much for my craft, but not to claim too little, either. You keep reminding me that the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy go hand in hand. Or as a character says in one of Tom Stoppard's plays, "People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark."

So this is it for me, but fortunately, not for NOW. David returns in three weeks.

I'm Bill Moyers. Thank you and farewell."

I saw afterwards that there is already a thread on the subject, yet this is more specifically geared towards the man and his work itself, rather than the idea of right vs. left wing media and the power that the former currently has.